Access Maths meeting

Four teachers from Inverclyde, Lanark, Fife and Highland met at the end of their school day to discuss Access Maths provision from Access 1 to 3. We learnt about each others' situation and the way in which our courses are run and resourced. There was concern about the 'dryness' of the course and much of the conversation centred on how to make it more lively and relevant to the pupils. A common theme was the disruption that many pupils encounter (for non Maths reasons), which meant that there was often little scope for whole-class teaching. With A Curriculum for Excellence on the horizon, we heard of some examples of cross-curricular planning eg working with Home Economics on measuring liquids; Technical/Craft on measuring lengths. The challenge is to avoid making subjects so discrete that pupils are unable to transfer skills and that they see the relevance of the skills and concepts. One way of doing this would be to ensure that the same, often technical language, is used across all subjects.

There appears to be a lack of resources at Access 1 and 2. The materials hosted at www.ltscotland.org.uk/nq/subjects/mathematics were discussed. It was noted that these are downloadable, with some having been updated since released six years ago.

Interesting ideas mentioned, included:

• take the main topics and concepts and design the classroom around them eg a height ruler at the door
  
• use an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) eg in a class of six, a teacher could set up a seperate 'flipchart' for each pupil. Promethean Planet has hundreds of Maths flipcharts created by teachers from around the world. A flipchart is like a PowerPoint slideshow, but more interactive


• use PowerPoint Maths slideshows


• TeeJay Maths - there may be an Access level esource soon
  
• Talk Money, Talk Maths - Financial education through Mathematics. Working with sample mobile phone bills etc
  
• One school in the West of Scotland has Access Maths students running a cafe as part of their studies.