To start this blog, I will ask you to search online ‘pictures of children learning in a classroom’. How many of the pictures show a teacher at the front of a class directing learning? How many show children learning without an adult? Why does the…
Read morePhonics, what’s all the fuss about? Learning to read is essential for a child’s learning journey. Without the ability to read fluently, children cannot move on to the ‘reading to learn’ stage. In our modern society a huge amount of information is online and often…
Read moreThe students we are teaching today will work in a world that we cannot comprehend. The tasks they will carry out and the strategies and techniques needed are beyond our understanding. But we do know that our students will depend on their skills to be…
Read moreMany schools are enthusiastically adopting Bar Models as a problem-solving tool in mathematics. They are very popular in Asian schools and increasingly so in the UK. And with good reason. The bar is a very versatile problem-solving tool, but it needs to be introduced carefully….
Read moreI have never seen anything written about this aspect of Bar Modelling. Traditionally, teachers go on courses, train others, and then immediately start to roll out the method to their students. This approach has two problems. Firstly, the ‘why’ is rarely addressed. In his book,…
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