Multisensory Maths Teaching - some photos

When I was tutoring Maths face to face I tried to make things as practical as possible - multi-sensory teaching is the key to helping children remember concepts and learn new things.

Although I no longer teach Maths online, I highly recommend Komodo Maths. They are a British company made up of maths teachers who offer an excellent maths programme online. Click here to read my Komodo page or click here to go directly to Komodo.

Fractions: several of my students had problems grasping fractions. I bought some apples from nearby Sainsbury's, remembered the knife and chopping board, and we started investigating fractions! That evening I gave them a good wash and made a delicious apple crumble :-)

Using practical apparatus for adding tens and units - plus a little red frog for tens ('Tensie') and a little green frog for the ones ('Onesie'!)

Here we are doing division with the frogs and sharing the 'cheese' out. This piccy represents 25 divided by 5. We can see that each frog gets 5 bits of cheese! I don't think frogs eat cheese but it didn't seem to matter!

I like to use cuisenaire rods - each coloured rod represents a number. Here we explore doubling numbers up to 20.

Finally, here's a video made of the 6 x table. 'Nic2' was an 11 year old student struggling to learn the times tables. We used the rhyming dictionary to find words to rhyme with the answers to the table. For example: '4 x 6 knocking at the door; 4 x 6 is 24'. This is her animation and it starts with her drumming the rhythm on the desk! There's also some improvised music at the end made on the keyboard!

Maths can be fun. Just try to make it as hands on as possible.

Created and written by Hilary Burt.