26 Mar Year One Wonders!
The children love it and I am in awe of how it gives them wings with their counting.
As a team, we relish hearing from parents and teachers about how NumBots has impacted children’s mathematical development. Recently we received a message from a teacher who had implemented NumBots as a key tool to improve maths outcomes for her class. After just one term of using the programme, her class produced the highest standardised results she had ever seen! For this reason, we were eager to share her tips on how she makes the most out of the programme and its resources.
Clare McAdam, who is a Year One teacher at St John’s Church Of England Academy in Darlington, tells us that using NumBots on a daily basis has “taken the children’s maths to a new level this year”.
Here’s how Clare has turned her class into number bond gurus:
Clare takes her class to the ICT room for 20 minutes of NumBots practice everyday. These sessions are supplemented with additional resources:
– Number lines to 20
– 100 squares
– Tens and ones dienes
– Numicon
– Doubles and halves fact sheet
We practise daily for 20 minutes. I love the stats and find the ranking of children based on their NumBots level very useful
Using the ‘Stats’ function, Clare is able to access actionable data. This is a useful tool that allows teachers to track their pupils’ progress and levels of engagement.
I really like the Stats function - it's actually very informative because some children really shine and others who we would expect to manage, struggle.
Those children that tend to struggle can be supported further. The exclamation mark icon enables Clare to identify which level individual students find particularly difficult.
We check the red exclamation marks on a daily basis and do a quick 1:1 to get the children through their difficulty.
Teachers can reward and celebrate the effort and progress of their pupils with auto-populated certificates that can be downloaded from the Certificates Hub. This positive reinforcement helps to boost their motivation.
Each week we track the children and give out certificates- they love getting arms, legs and body parts.
So, did NumBots make a difference to Clare’s Year One class?
In order to determine how productive the daily trips to the ICT had been, Clare set the class a test after one term of using NumBots. The results were highly indicative; the children had produced the highest standardised scores Clare had ever seen, strongly suggesting that NumBots had made a substantial positive impact on the mathematical development of her class. Or in the words of Clare “NumBots gave them wings with their counting!”.