The March Hare was certainly mad but not as excited as we get when it comes to the 1st of the month and our chance to go round school keeping our favourite teachers right with their class calendars.

The ELP Calendar Police tour of duty today took in no fewer than 7 members of staff – all of whom needed the expert guiding hand of Amy and Steven to ensure that they were operating in an up to date manner. We can’t have PL staff being behind the times.

This monthly ritual is proving to be an important reinforcement of the concepts learned in maths for our ELP pupils. Understanding the importance of the calendar and its daily use is all well and good but meaningless if nobody presents the opportunity to our pupils to get hands on experience of working them – and remembering when to change them.  We are always grateful to mainstream staff who offer up their time voluntarily to support this kind of lifeskills work around the school, whether it be giving the pupils a simple shopping list and some money, letting them change your calendars or having them help deliver your veggie bag. Thank you!

Dr Voge, we have to report, has in his usual inimitable style taken things to extremes. 7 calendars later (one for each ELP pupil) his classroom is now in March 2010 officially. We should point out that only 3 of them had choo choos(sorry locomotive engines)  on them.

In the last week we have been practising aspects of our everyday maths by taking a trip to the Post Office.

Our task was to establish how much a First Class stamp would cost in addition to posting a parcel to another town.

Finding out the cost of the stamp was easy. We simply asked the lady behind the counter for the price and she told us it was “39p”  for a normal size card or letter.

Finding out the cost of posting a parcel took a lot more initiative. We needed to help the lady work out the cost by placing our parcel on a set of scales and having it weighed. She told us it weighed 1kg and that 1kg of parcel costs a lot more than a First Class stamp! It is £4.41 to send a 1kg box somewhere in the UK by First Class ordinary mail.

Now we had to work out how much money we would need to give the lady. This wasn’t so easy. So we broke the sum down with a bit of help from our teacher.

A stamp is 39p. If you forget the £4 bit of the £4.41 then the parcel could be 41p.

    39 + 41 was a sum Dale  could do quite quickly and he told us it would be 80p. We then added the £4 back on to the 80p and came up with the answer £4.80.

We had come to the shop with £5 in our bag. Did we have enough? We soon realised that £5 is more than £4  something…so yes we did!

We are still working hard on change and this was a very difficult thing to work out. But we do know that the 20p given back to us by the lady in the Post Office was the correct amount. We will need to spend some time in school practising working change out so some day soon we might be sure of that for ourselves too…

In the meantime our teacher still thinks we are

shopping-worksheet

This week we will be continuing to look as shopping money activities. On Monday we paid a visit to the local Scotmid, armed with a worksheet (see above link) that asked us to find the prices of a range of items – and find out what foodstuffs or household goods were on offer as a BOGOF…

(That’s buy one get one free for the uninitiated who believe we really ARE rude 😉  )

We had a very busy lesson writing down the price of apples (not forgetting the pound sign £ or the decimal point), tin foil, crisps and toothpaste amongst other things. We discovered that you could BOGOF with Pringles, Easter Eggs, Choc Ices, Coca Cola, Cif Cleaning Fluid and Jammie Dodgers…

Later on this week we will also continue to practise telling the time, counting in twos and tens and sequencing our numbers (backwards and forwards).

Can you spot the missing numbers in this sequence?

What numbers fit between 4 and 7? And in what order do they come?

These are the sorts of questions we have been asking ourselves in maths of late, using Ms Balsillies number “washing line” to help us. Sometimes finding the missing number is easy, other times we need to think a bit longer – or even “phone a friend” for some advice.

Using the numbers 1-10 we are increasingly confident of completing a number sequence like this, though we sometimes need a bit more time if the number sequence runs from 10-1. Like walking backwards, counting backwards takes a bit more effort and thought.

Using numbers 10-20 we are making progress although the counting backwards sequences can sometimes be a bit more daunting. Our hope is that we will soon have enough confidence that some of us could tackle a sequence like the one below…

Some of us have also been practising our time an awful lot recently. We are getting pretty cool at doing the o’clock times – you won’t catch us out with those unless you get up very early in the morning!

We still need a bit more practise with our half pasts – but we are getting there! Card games that rely on us telling the time to win, really make a big difference to our enjoyment of learning the time. Ms Balsillie has some really good ones – one of them was even shown on Waterloo Road recently :o)

Practising the time at home is going to be very important for the children retaining and gaining confidence in using times. They may need a little more time than adults, or even other siblings (young and old) but they will get there with a bit of support and thinking time.