Medium term plans | Lesson planning | Maths lessons | Literacy lessons
Time for some maths planning tips! Hopefully this helps you get an idea about how to plan and structure a maths lesson within a series of lessons :)
1) Like general lesson planing, its important to get your learning objective and success criteria for the lesson ready first. These again will come from your medium term plans which are heavily structured based on national curriculum content, so there is less room for going off topic. As maths and literacy are lessons which are completed daily in school, it is likely you will have a weekly maths plan, covering a set topic or part of a topic. Breaking this subtopic down into 5 lessons to be taught during the week is the first thing to do!
2) Hereās an example of the weekly overview maths planning for a KS1 class. As you can see not a great deal is covered during the week, but each lesson builds on the childās existing knowledge and extends their learning slowly. A KS2 weekly plan would cover nearly twice as much content in a week, encouraging a breadth of knowledge and more time to practice the complex skills being learnt.
3) After dividing your subtopic into a weekās worth of lessons, time to plan each individual lesson. This follows a similar structure to the general lesson planning, of an introduction, main teaching activity, independent activity and plenary. However, your introduction to the lesson should be an oral and mental starter activity to get childrenās brains in gear and prepared for the mental mathematics and calculations they will be doing in the lesson. The lesson plan below is the 4th out of a series of 5 lessons on money, subtraction and change.
4) I like to use whiteboards for the oral/mental starter so that all the children are participating and using their brains. Itās really important to make sure all children can participate in the starter activity regardless of ability, and only minor differentiation should be used if at all as all the pupils can clearly see which members of the class are doing different levels of work. I use lots of online games for starter activities including topmarks, topmarks whiteboard, multipication.com and bbc bitesize. In the lesson below, I allow the children to think of as many number bonds to 20, which will help them with the number problems in the following lesson.
5) The plans for maths lessons go into a bit more detail than foundation subject lessons as often each step of a calculation has to be worked in a slow, methodical way for the children to understand how to work things out themselves. Scaffolding the childrenās learning of mathematical concepts can sometimes be trickier than you think and itās worth writing out in your plan exactly how you are going to talk the class through a concept. Asking the children to have a go at some simpler versions of the problem and show their answers on whiteboards/number fans/flash cards works well as you can then tailor the pace of your lesson to suit the class and see where/who is having difficulties.
6) There are usually more ability groups in maths lessons than any other lesson as children often find it hard to complete activities with larger numbers they have less experience with, whilst others relish the challenge of using the biggest numbers in their calculations! In this plan, I have 5 differentiated groups, with all children completing calculations (giving change from different amounts) that will challenge them.
7) The plenary for a maths lesson should be more substantial than a foundation lesson and recap the learning that has taken place as well as address any misconceptions that have arisen during the lesson. Occasionally it is appropriate to get the children to come up and show the class how to go through a problem independently on the whiteboard, but at other times it is better to gauge how much the children have taken in by paying some sort of game or doing a quiz where everyone can participate - this also helps your future planning/tweaking of the next lesson!
8) As always, evaluating how the lesson went, what the children learned and what issues need to be addressed next lesson. Most of the time maths work is quick to mark, which helps you evaluate how things went before the next lesson!
Hopefully this has helped you to get a clearer idea of how a series of maths lessons can be planned but if you need further clarification on anything or have another question to ask, feel free to send me a message here :)
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