Digital Maths Intervention???

At the moment in our school we set for Maths. In the ‘old days’ under the previous curriculum, that worked fine as lower achieving children learnt their next steps and moved on in a linear fashion (frequently from the content of a year below where they actually were).

With the new curriculum, we still set but both classes endeavour to cover their year groups objectives (meaning the lower sets, which I teach one of) sometimes do back tracking before beginning their year group’s content.

All fine so far.

With the way we and many schools are going (taking on a full mastery approach to Maths), this means we will need to run a daily ‘keep up’ group— run by a TA (who was present and involved in the initial lesson) where children who did not understand the underlying concepts of the lesson get further explanation, support and the opportunity to practice. Obviously this relies on having a knowledgeable and fairly dynamic TA (I’m lucky enough to have one!) and enough flexibility in each year group’s timetable to allow it to occur (it’ll certainly be tricky for us).

This will hopefully stop children from falling too far behind in their learning (it’s working pretty well so far in 2 classes I know of) so that they can access their next lesson, which will likely include some level of spiral learning where concepts and understanding are built on the previous day, giving all children a chance to consolidate, deepen and master (if you will) the knowledge, skills and understanding.

That’s all well and good but then we enter the murky depths of those key, underlying, basic skills that you just HAVE to have by the end of that year group. I’m talking number facts to 10 and 20, counting in different steps and times tables (anyone like to add any others?). These skills are a prerequisite from that year group onwards as future content often relies on fluent application, if not 100% recall of facts. Therefore these areas become (I hate the term but I’ll use it anyway) ‘non negotiables’ that simply must be fairly secure by every child (minus those with learning barriers in the SEN bracket) by the end of the year they are taught in.

So what happens at the moment to the fairly large group of children who have not got these key, core skills?

My first thought is to put a daily afternoon intervention in place for them. Potentially, per year group, in order to catch those children up in addition to their year group focused maths lessons with associated ‘keep up’ sessions. The problem is that it’s expensive. Assuming it would be a TA delivering the intervention, you’d need to employ at least 2, purely focusing on this, so that all year groups could gain. Alternatively you put that support in place in ks1 and year 3 and potentially do so with 1 TA. Either way it’s more money at a time where there is uncertainty about budgets.

Then I got to thinking a little more carefully. What would the TA actually be doing during those interventions? Being rapid recall based, all those basic skills require little and often practice, fairly sequentially, building up fluent methods, slowly turning into immediate recall. So a TA would probably be showing them a calculation and expecting the children to answer that calculation as a fact (after modelling, using concrete apparatus etc). Well surely that kind of thing can be done fairly well using a well chosen computer package / app? Unless it’s an adaptive Maths package (sadly lacking at BETT) it’s going to have limitations — it’ll gladly fire off number facts and tables for children to calculate and give immediate feedback, but it won’t then give some/all of those children time to use concrete apparatus and have the process modelled/explained/be immersed. In theory they will already have had that in the whole class lesson but being realistic, they need more exposure to be able to move towards any kind of growing fluency.

So, where I am now is trying to think of a computer package / app that we can use that will not only fire off questions the children can practice at that final stage of developing instant recall, but also the stage/s previous to it. And unfortunately I don’t know any that do that! I’ll even settle for something that just does that stage before practicing rapid recall as there are plenty of good options for that such as:

Sumdog / Manga High / Mathletics / Maths Splat and others.

You’ve got an adaptive package that meets the old curriculum (possibly the new curriculum too but I’ve not looked it for a while) in RM Easimaths but that doesn’t focus on just those key elements that are needed. And as a previous user, it had flaws.

So my question is… do you know of any that cover what I’m saying? A package that helps children build their fluency in number facts, ideally progressing alongside the children? Quite simple. Why don’t I know about it if it exists?!! What would you use or do? I’d LOVE to know!