Total Teaching Blog

Maths in the Early Years There are many ways you can begin to introduce maths in the home in the early years. We at Total Teaching believe in the 2 Minute Noodles method of making short but frequent conversations with your children about learning a routine in your home. With this series Maths in the Early Years, we hope to give you ideas of how you can weave math skills into your everyday routines. Counting at Home We are very excited to be joined by one of the youngest members of the Total Teaching Team. Billie (4 years old) will show us some of the different ways she practises her counting at home. She also talks about a show that gets her excited about Numeracy - Numberblocks. You can find them on Youtube or Netflix. Counting Bears As she counts up to 5 and up to 10, you can see that she is touching one bear for each number as she lines them up. This is a great strategy you can model with your own children.  Joining Groups of Bears When adding a group of 3 bears to a group of ...

  Challenge yourself to a problem solving task! In this series one of our teachers works through a problem solving task showing you how they would solve it and common misconceptions students have when solving it. Try solving the problem on your own first before watching the solutions in the video. ___________________________________________________________________________________ This week's problem is The Escape from NZ Maths Can you help Georgia, Aria, and Oliver with their shopping? Watch the full video of how we work through this Shopping problem. We focused on Georgia’s problem to look at decimals and place value. Watch at your own pace and pause when you need to. Did you use the same strategies or do something different?  This week we asked Year 5 and 6 students to attempt the problem. From this we can see some common mistakes many students make when working with decimals.  Looking at Georgia's problem, we are trying to solve 5 - 1.10. An answer that popped up a lo...