Darts

Today has been a very rewarding day spent training with our primary school teachers. We are continuing with our mission to make lessons more active, stimulating and enjoyable for the children and had a lot of fun trying out some new ideas and planning a new project. I'm afraid I ran out of time to write the blog last night due to the length of time I spent putting the resources for our training together.

I think the hit of the day was discovering that darts (as any self respecting darts player knows) is a great game for developing a number of maths skills as well as hand eye coordination. Only one of our teachers had played darts before so we had to start with the basics of scoring. Once we'd established the rules we had a mini tournament with three teams. The session lasted for about ninety minutes and was hilarious. The teams were very competitive and we had some interesting adjudications on borderline scores. We were using magnetic darts which have different ends to normal dart and tend to sit exactly on the border line between sections of the board. I can't wait to see the children getting started on this particular activity.

I ended up having a mathematical evening as well. Two of our Technical School students came to see if I could help them with some maths problems involving percentage discounts. It's been a little while since I tackled this kind of problem so I had to look up the solution method before getting started on the teaching. It soon became apparent that my two students didn't have a very good grasp of their multiplication tables so we ended up trying out some strategies to help them master these basic facts. We've agreed to have a few maths 'boot camp' sessions to boost their confidence and help them to understand the more complicated concepts and operations that they are encountering now that they are at secondary school. It might seem like an unlikely activity to develop a real enthusiasm for but maths is one of those subjects were you can witness the magical 'penny drops' moment when a student finally grasps something fully for the first time. I'm now honing my maths coaching skills in anticipation of some good results.