Inside Our Classrooms: Learning You Can Touch

Walk into a Primary classroom at OLIS during a maths period and you are unlikely to find thirty children copying from a board. You are more likely to find them standing around a table with a tray of counters, arguing about whether a number can be made in more than one way.

Concrete first, then written

We teach the early years concretely first. A concept is introduced with something the children can pick up - blocks, beads, coins, their own fingers - then drawn, and only then written as a number sentence. It is slower in week one and considerably faster by week six, because nobody is manipulating symbols they do not understand.

Groups that nobody can hide in

Group work is deliberate too. Tables are arranged in fours, and most activities have a role for each child, so the quiet ones cannot quietly opt out. Teachers rotate the groups every few weeks so that no child spends the year in the same company. None of this is new pedagogy. It is simply the difference between a classroom where knowledge is delivered and one where it is built, and the children can tell you which one they are in.