What is Let’s Think through Maths?

This is the name given to the early primary CAME materials. There are two resource packs available for the ages 5/6 through to 8/9 years of age. The green pack – Let’s Think through Maths!, for use with 5 and 6 year olds. The grey pack – Let’s Think through Maths! 6 – 9, for use with 6 to 8/9 year olds.

Let’s Think through Maths!

The CAME pack for five and six year old’s is part of a larger family of teaching materials called Let’s Think! All of the Let’s Think! programmes seek to help teachers develop their pupils thinking and reasoning abilities.

The 10 lessons that make up Let’s Think through Maths! help young pupils to see maths as a way of thinking about the world and not just a series of facts or algorithms. By focusing upon mathematical ways of thinking, pupils in Let’s Think lessons begin to gain a better understanding of the content of maths. Indeed the lessons have been designed to address the deeper structures that underpin most maths curricula. Let’s Think through Maths! does not seek to deliver mathematical content but rather to develop, in 6 year old pupils, a mathematical way of looking at the world around them. Such a perception can then serve as a foundation for the more formal mathematical instruction to come.

Thinking strands
The ten lessons are divided into the four thinking strands of:

1. Number,
2. Measurement,
3. Data-handling,
4. Shape and space.

There are two main objectives underpinning Let’s Think through Maths!:

Development of understanding The lessons give young children the chance to effectively construct the concepts that underpin the maths they are taught. The concept of zero and measurement are two areas where much is assumed from children in the earliest years of schooling. The aim is to allow the pupils to effectively ‘re-invent’ and discover a concept that escaped ‘western’ think for many hundreds of years.

Teaching for learning
The pack seeks to enhance the mathematical diet of five and six year olds. The lessons work best when they are used in conjunction with and alongside the standard curriculum. Many of the skills and ideas developed during the Let’s Think sessions can be used to assist teachers as they plan their day to day numeracy work.

Let’s Think through Maths! 6 – 9

If the green pack can be seen as a vehicle for developing a mathematical focus upon the world then the materials for 6 to 8 year olds can be see to challenge pupils to get to grips with the big ideas underpinning primary school mathematics. The 19 lessons in this pack cover the five reasoning strands of:

I have heard that the materials draw upon theories of learning. I thought I left all that behind years ago!

Yes that is correct but rather then spend too long here on this topic (see research section for more about this) a little quote from the publication itself may help at this stage:

We can tell you a little about this, but it only becomes real for you as you (re) construct your own experiences of it. The same applies to your children’s development. There are two main sources of psychological research and theory which underpin the CAME approach. From the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget comes both a qualitative description of children’s thinking as it develops, and also the possibility of analysing the maths curriculum in terms of the relative difficulty of its underlying concepts. But the Russian psychologist Vygotsky revealed how powerful in children’s development is their interaction amongst the immediate social environment of their peers—children of the same age in school, or brothers and sisters and friends in their own homes.

The point to make about theory is that all who work with children are guided, in their interactions, by beliefs and expectation about learning. In the CAME project we believe that the work of Piaget provides helpful descriptors of what pupils can do, in thinking terms, and it is this perspective that enables us to devise appropriate and challenging mathematical tasks. From Vygotsky comes the social side of the learning process. It is this focus that provides the guidance for the effective orchestration of classroom interactions.