Thinking of setting up your own after-school maths club? The team at Sumdog are here to help you get started! Keep readying to find out our top tips and tricks.
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What makes after-school maths clubs so great?
Maths can be a difficult subject to teach. Your class can lose interest quickly, children can experience blockers and keeping their stamina up can become a real challenge. Gamification helps with that, but there is only so much excitement you can build up around maths during a lesson.
After-school maths clubs are a great solution to these issues. Not only do they create a more relaxed learning environment, they also allow for different types of inter-level learning. To help you create your own maths club or discover fresh ideas, we’ve asked our team of experienced teachers for their top tips!
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Our teacher’s top tips for after-school maths clubs:
1. Maths choice boards
Whether you’re staying in the classroom or trying to encourage outdoor learning, maths choice boards are a fun way to practise maths concepts in a concrete way. Create a list of items or elements your pupils have to find in their direct surroundings. These could be five right angles, a circular item or even objects to create their own equations with.
2. Cultivate inter-level collaboration
Pupils may operate at different levels within one year group and this usually makes tailoring teaching to your class difficult. A maths club will usually have a mix of children from different year groups, so why not trust the older pupils to support younger or struggling ones?
Sumdog user Miss Szula runs a successful maths club in her Glasgow school. There, she receives help from older pupils and has seen an incredibly positive impact as a result.
“I have been using Sumdog as part of our weekly infant maths club (P1-P3) to provide more opportunities for our younger learners to engage in using digitial technology to help improve their maths skills. Some of our P7s volunteered to help out at the club as some younger learners were not very familiar with using iPads or Sumdog. This helped to build the confidence of our younger pupils as well as providing support to answer any trickier questions. The pupils absolutely loved coming along to the maths club each week. They were able to compete/work with their friends whilst revising important maths concepts and, most importantly, have fun.”
3. Make use of board games
Lots of well-known board games include maths-related aspects. To make learning feel a little different from what pupils do in the classroom, you could provide your maths club with games all children can play and enjoy. For example: Monopoly is a great option to teach children to count money, chess involves strategy and counting, and many other games involve logical thinking and probability to support their learning.
4. Encourage healthy competition
When children know they’ve got a chance to win prizes and play against their peers, their motivation skyrockets! It’s even more exciting if they can play at their own level regardless of their opponent. Using Sumdog’s contests or multiplayer games in your maths club can help you foster relationships between your pupils while getting them to practise the skills you teach in class. They’re designed to adapt to a pupil’s level, too, so a year 1 could beat a year 6 — that’s pretty exciting! To top it all off, they can also win coins to buy fun items for their avatar, home and garden!
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So now that you’ve got plenty of ideas and activities – you’re ready to set up your own maths club!
