In my last post I talked about a structured approach to maths. Unable to find anything that met my needs I launched into creating my very own scope and sequence. Now as usual I am no expert, but I am great at researching, trialing and finding out what does and does not work for our learners. It has been a lot of hard work, but an absolute pleasure to be able to use it as I was writing it to make sure that it would work in a normal classroom environment, or one like mine, largely based on play. Why? This year the children starting in our class were not developmentally ready for agency...this was a first for me. I also discovered that number sense was a challenge for many and a basic understanding of our number system had not yet been developed at an early level. They had a lot of 'rote' learning...counting and recognising numerals, but didn't understand that these symbols carried a meaning. Numerosity was not a strength, they did not understand the mean...
I am passionate about play and structured explicit learning, finding the best of both worlds.