The Fantastic Fairground

Before I started the course, Maths was the one thing I was terrified about teaching. I don't remember much from my Primary Maths lessons (which probably tells me they weren't very engaging), but I had some pretty nasty Secondary Maths teachers who shattered my confidence completely in Maths, despite the fact that I wasn't even that bad at it. But that shattered confidence stuck with me to this day, so I was extremely nervous at the thought of having to teach it to children. However, our first Maths seminar made me feel so much better about he subject. It was engaging, I understood the challenges, and I even had fun doing them! 

To start off the seminar, we were given The Sock Challenge. 

Imagine I have 10 pink socks and 10 blue socks. I put them all into a drawer. What's the maximum number of socks I have to pull out before I get a pair?

We worked in groups to discuss the answer, and our group decided that we would have to pull out 11 socks to find a pair. Looking back at this now, I feel a little silly, but it wasn't until we were shown how important visualisation is to a child trying to work out a Maths problem. Our tutor visualised this for us by pulling imaginary socks from a bag.

The first sock I pull out is pink. The next one is blue. Will I have a pair if the third is pink? Or blue? 

This was a completely new way of working out a Maths problem for me. I'd always been encouraged to do things in my head, and this was such a simple way for the answer to be found. 

The Connectionist Approach

For the next part of the seminar, we were introduced to the three approaches to teaching: 

Transmission, Discovery, and Connectionist.

The Transmission approach is very much a teacher doing all the talking, with very little involvement from the children, which we all agreed was not the way we wanted to teach. 

The Discovery approach was quite the opposite, the teacher offering little guidance, encouraging the children to explore their own ideas. 

We focused more on the Connectionist approach, as this seems to be a balance between the two. 

This approach is definitely something I will be applying in my teaching, allowing the children to explore connections through the enactive, iconic and symbolic stages of learning (using concrete items acted out, to using icons to represent objects, to being able to visualise them mentally).

We then moved on to a brilliant example of connectionist teaching: The Fantastic Fairground. 

Our tutor set the scene: 

You have gone to visit a fairground. The first ride is a new one. It looks really exciting - lots of lights, machinery and noise. The owner says they've been building it for 10 years and it's finally ready to use! As you're the first customers, you can ride this one for free! It's called The Time Machine. You strap yourself into the cars and the start button is pressed. But something goes horribly wrong! Sparks fly, there and bangs and crashes, and the owner shouts in panic as the lights go out. When the lights come back on, the whole fairground looks different. The stalls and rides have changed, and people are wearing strange clothes seen in history books from the last century. Disaster! It seems The Time Machine has worked too well, and you're stranded in a fairground of the past! To re-program the machine, you need to discover the exact time and date you've been sent back to. Each stall you visit will give you part of that information, but only when you've got all the complete and accurate details can you hope to get safely back to your own time.

Our tutor had arranged the room into 7 different sections. In each section was a piece of paper with a Maths problem such as:

On another wall, there was the decoding sheet, where we could change the answers we got into a date or time. Each activity focused on a different area of Maths, such as shapes, averages and patterns. This would be particularly successful in a classroom, as if they worked in groups, each child would have different strengths, so it would allow them to help each other to find the answer. 

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this activity, and it was nice to have some of my other group members explain how to work certain problems out, and vice versa. It's fair to say I'm feeling a lot better about teaching Maths after this.