Silkysteps early years forum - planning ideas for play - Ways to support develop children's self esteem and confidence in maths?

Hi welcome to the site, sorry for the delay replying.

For the first point, there is a table on page 144 of the level 3 Support teaching and learning handbook that explains this.

Depending on the activity you chose to do, you will be looking at ways to develop children's self-esteem and confidence by :

Showing pupils what they already know about maths: Children and young people may not aways be aware of how much they know already about maths. As part of your practice, encourage them to think about how they might use it on a day-to-day basis.

Teach children that failure and getting things wrong are a part of learning: Many children and young people lack confidence with maths because they are worried about 'getting it wrong'. They mistakenly think that maths is all about the answer rather then the process. Educators need to instil in students the importance of working through a series of steps.

Use of play: It is important to ahow children and young people that maths is fun. Playing games is an effective way of learning about counting up and down, adding, subtracting, and other aspects of maths such as problem solving. There may be board games, playing ards, internet games or others.

Encourage problem solving skills: It is important that pupils learn to develop problem solving skills, and to know there is no 'right' or 'wrong' way of finding an answer. Working with others on practical activities is a good way of doing this as it is fun and shows them different ways approaching a task.

Play with numbers eg. finding patterns in times tables or other calculations: Pupils may enjoy finding patterns and looking at different ways in which they can use things to predict outcomes in maths. For example, if I know that 3 x 3 = 9, I can predict 30 x 30 = 900

Relate maths to real life: Any opportunities you can use to put maths into context will benefit pupils, particularly those who are reluctant to take part or who lack confidence. This may be when shopping, gardening or cooking, or many other real life situations.

Second
• 7.3: Use a range of strategies for supporting learners to develop reading and writing and communication skills.

Page 134 of the STL texbook helps with this:

It's quite extensive reading and you'll be looking at covering how,

depending on your role within the classroom and the age range of pupils you suppor, you should be able to use a variety of strategies to help them develop thier En glish skills, bot in the subject itself and in others. Teachers may point you towards specific programmes and materials if you need to work n focussed literacy interventions, however, many of the following strategies will be available to you as part of your daily practice and can be used to support children's reading, writing and communication skills.

Targeted prompts and feedback to develop the use of independent reading and writing strategies.
These can be visual prompts, spoken or written.

eg. A child who regularly rushes when reading aloud, and tends to miss out parts of the tex, may have 'I will slow down when reading' as a verbal reminder at the beginning of the activity and written on a bookmark so they see it when opening their book.

Encouraging pupils to engage in talk, discussion and oral rehearsal before completing reading and writing tasks.

Fascilitating the participation of individuals or small groups in shared reading and writing activities

Using phonics to help learners understand the sound and spelling system, and to read and spell correctly.

This will include your understanding of:
Phoneme
Grapheme
Diagraph
Trigraph
Diphthong
Blending
Segmenting

They are all explained in the handbook on page 135 - 138

Use of specific support strategies eg. paired reading, writing frames.

Use of specific support programmes e.g. grdeed reading books, differentiated computr-based learning programmes, additional literacy support.

Hope this all helps a little xx