Basic Facts Boxes v2

Basic Facts Boxes has been updated, four years after I first developed it. This version has several new features to improve the experience all coming under an altered basic facts focus and a different physical layout.

Basic Facts Boxes v2 focuses on the addition/subtraction facts to 20 and times tables, i.e. the first 100 multiplications. I work with students who have major gaps in knowledge and are often far behind expectations, so I need to figure out ways of helping them learn. The Numeracy Development Project takes children on a meandering path through number learning, which in my opinion makes children run sections of the path before they can walk. Focusing on the facts to 20 and times tables covers the main facts we English speaking people need as core maths skills.

To differentiate for those less skilled, there is now the option of choosing ordered or random. Ordered being the easier version... That's assumed, not tested. I would hope that students would be able to see a pattern forming so they can solve anything they don't know yet. Anyone who can't is likely to need a different level of education programme anyway.

The basic facts boxes that students fill in are now collated into two 10x10 grids (excluding frames). This change imparts several improvements:

• Increased practise frequency within a single "box".
• Smoother and faster number entry. Users now only need to use the tab and enter keys to move between cells.
• Improved screenshot captures.
• The ability to print to an A4 page.

Using a new format forced me to make improvements on the layout and programming. Everything except the title, grid, and buttons at the top are generated through the script. This brings everything one step closer to a "fool proof" spreadsheet where if anything (such as the grid) was deleted somehow, the whole grid would be reset/ regenerated by clicking a button.

Extended Discussion - Actual Teacher Inquiry

This year is shaping up to be a strange one. While I am still working on maths, my inquiry this year is into reading comprehension and more specifically an initiative called Extended Discussion. Extended Discussion attempts to improve reading comprehension of texts through conversation between group members. This is very different from my initial post about this year's inquiry.

The end goal of Extended Discussion is to have students discussing a text and asking questions of each other. Discussion and questioning pools students' mental resources and gives opportunities to learn from others or teach others. Effective questioning also encourages students to discover where they may not realise they have misunderstood the text.

Obviously, training students to be capable of conversation requires different amounts of work for different students. In general the students of my class tend to be on the polite side, not wanting to disagree or speak out of turn. A handful are able to comprehend texts at their chronological age or higher. Even then, they still do not have the background knowledge (derived from reading mileage) to help them overcome some language hurdles such as idioms or metaphor. A large majority of my students' reading ages are sitting just below their chronological age. On top of that, they have the same background knowledge issues as the handful mentioned above but more pronounced. While I suspect much of my students' reluctance to answer questions, or their seeming inability to answer simple questions is the result of doing nothing at home over our multitude of lockdowns, the reading mileage issue has been present since long before lockdowns started. 

A breakdown of my process follows:

The benefit of running this in my Reading programme is that it is going in the direction I wanted my Maths to go, hence the Reciprocal Maths cards I developed. I will be trying to develop this within my Maths programme as well.