Year one maths

[Asleeponasunbeam]

What sort of things are your y1 children doing in maths? I don't mean 'what can your child do?' - not a comparison thread - but what do they bring home/ talk about etc?

We chose dd's school deliberately for its relaxed ethos, but as a teacher (in a very formal and high pressured primary) I do tend to struggle with myself sometimes!

I'm just concerned that they're not doing enough maths. I can't see that they will meet end of year expectations, or get even close to that. DD is very young in the year and I'm very happy with how she is doing generally. I'm worried that there will be a sudden change at y2 that will be very difficult for her, especially as there is also a mixed y1/2 class (that I asked for her not to be in) who may well be doing higher level maths.

How do I approach this without seeming pushy or judgemental? It's harder than I thought being a teacher-parent!

FWIW, I think my own school is way too pushy and formal and would hate DD to be there. But our results are excellent!

DS1 seems to do much less than many threads on MN talking about reading. Not sure if maths is the same or not.

He has been adding single digit numbers.
Using a 100 square to add bigger numbers, and last week came home talking about adding "big" numbers using boxes. I assume this is a 2 digit and a 1 digit number.
They have been doing money this week.
They must have been doing time, as there is no way us giving him a watch for Christmas has resulted in the improvement recently!!!
We had to do Grasshopper counting walking home from the library today - so we counted to 60 in 1's, 2's, 3's (I asked if he'd done this with his teacher and the answer was No, so I did 1,2, he did 3, I did 4,5 etc), 5's and 10's. The 60 was because he asked if it would take a minute to walk home. The numbers above will let you know it was much more than a minute!
He has picked up a reasonable grasp of left and right, weights, distances etc.

What has your DD done?

Thanks. Ummm. She has done...nothing. I think. Last parents' evening, teacher just said she was confident in maths and 'picked things up easily'. I didn't think anything of it.

I feel like I've really let DD down now by leaving this so long. I could have (and still can, obviously, but not for the hour or so a day that she ought to be doing) taught her what she should be learning, but I just assumed school would be.

It's more obvious with reading and writing.

Very little seems to go on at DS school too. Certainly nothing like an hour a day. Nothing at all comes home.

Panicked slightly when teacher said they spent one week each on addition/subtraction/multiplication/division last term - shouldn't they be doing those all the time? And have some doubts about how that's being taught.

And that was the climax of the term, before that they seemed to just do counting and bigger than/smaller than. DS highly unimpressed. His 2 yr old sister could have done most of it.

This term so far they've been doing some fractions (colouring half/quarter of shapes as far as I can make out). Haven't detected anything else.

So we're doing 10 minutes a day at home now. At least with close supervision we might be able to get DS to write his digits the right way round by the end of the year...

DS has just started talking about tens and units so they seem to be doing place value. He can do basic adding and subtracting and some doubling and sharing. They've also been measuring with rulers.

Don't know what he is supposed to be doing but that's what he has mentioned.

Thanks. I'm not so concerned about the week on each operation thing (although I don't like it, that's how the curriculum is in some schools) more that DD doesn't seem to have moved on beyond counting.

She is very good at working things out, so perhaps I'm expecting too much. It's just that she does it all by counting. I will speak to the teacher tomorrow but probably ought to trust that they're doing things practically and this is enough.

We'll do a bit of practice at home, to write digits correctly at least!

Yes, lots of counting here too. I don't know if this is the same sort of thing you're having asleep. That's where I'm questioning the methods tho. At least, DS is uninclined but teacher wanted him to do e.g. 5 x 10 by drawing 5 rows of 10 things and then counting them. DS finds this daft, as do I. It's almost the opposite of reception where they were encouraging them to count in 5s and 10s and use that for problem solving.

DS teacher is very keen on making sure they understand concepts, I understand that. So they do small numbers using manipulatives/drawing rows of objects and counting, great. But then the differentiation for the stronger ones instead of moving on and doing it without manipulatives is to do bigger numbers using manipulatives and counting. Not so great.

I feel arithmetic is just as basic as phonics and should be practised every day. While other maths topics may have bits of incidental arithmetic, that doesn't get them the fluency they need. That would be like quitting teaching phonics in year 1 because they do reading in their other tasks.