Check In
Every unit of the schemes of work has a section dedicated to ‘prerequisites’. We have tried to list all the skills and understanding that is necessary to be able to progress with the new ideas within the unit. Exactly how you use this information with a class will of course vary: it depends on the pupils you have in front of you.
To support teachers in assessing pupils’ understanding of the prerequisites we have created these ‘Check In’ resources for Unit 1: 10 questions, answers included. That’s the idea anyway! We’d love to know if you find the check-ins useful and would like us to develop them for all units.
Build a Mathematician
Originally described as our ‘assessing without levels’ suite of assessment materials, BAM Tasks are intended to be used alongside the Kangaroo Maths schemes of work. The structure for this way of assessing, and building a picture of a mathematician, is listed on the overview page of each scheme. This assessing without levels document summarises key information from all the stages.
BAM tasks are ideal to consolidate intended learning, support deliberate practice sessions and/or use as homework tasks. The carefully crafted questions have been designed to assess fluency, reasoning, problem solving and a student’s ability to apply their understanding. One further question will always focus on a misconception. Pupils will really need to think deeply if they are to be successful with most or all of the questions on a BAM Task – this is intentional. For some pupils, the bottom line is being successful at just the fluency and misconception questions.
This BAM Tracker enables teachers to build a picture of their pupils and generate individual profiles. It is based on an idea in ‘Embedded Formative Assessment’ (Dylan Wiliam, 2011), and the intention is that it is used formatively throughout a year. We’ve also provided an example of a completed tracker as it is useful to see the endpoint you are aiming for.
Got It
Take another look at the grey box at the top of each unit of the schemes of work. As a reminder, these contain the statements from the source document for starting the schemes – the National Curriculum Programmes of Study.
‘Got It?’ is a collection of holistic assessments designed to assess pupils’ understanding of all these key statements within a stage and therefore help to build a mathematical profile against age related expectations. The assessments are structured such that Question 1 assesses statement 1 in our medium term plans; Question 2 assesses statement 2 and so on.