10 Good Reasons to Introduce Swimming In Maths across Your School
Here are 10 reasons why you should introduce Swimming In Maths across your school!
1. It’s super-child friendly!
It is visual (Ocean theme), there are numerous opportunities for listening to maths-talk and practicing maths language, children read and write frequently and learners get plenty of opportunity to get ‘hands-on’, experimenting with different approaches.
2. It encourages ‘good’ behaviour for learning
It encourages ‘at-least’ ‘good’ behaviour for learning through a high impact collaborative element, frequent celebration of achievement and children ‘owning’ their own learning journey. Children are active from the minute they enter your room. Teamwork is essential and positive relationships will flourish between your children as a result!
“Pupils love the challenge of learning and are resilient to failure. They are curious, interested learners who seek out and use new information to develop, consolidate and deepen their knowledge, understanding and skills. They thrive in lessons…” – Ofsted
3. It is an active way to start your day!
Who’s doing all the work, you or the children? With the first rule of the Deep Dive Challenge being that ‘no one sits down’, the children have no choice but to attack their challenge on their feet! Fancy grabbing a drink of water while all this is going on? Stop! Grab a pen instead, stand back and ‘listen’ to the conversations that occour spontaneously!
4. It is great for Ofsted
Ofsted have focused on how well schools are promoting depth before breadth ✔ keeping the whole class together despite differences in ability ✔ developing conceptual understanding through the use of concrete and pictorial apparatus ✔ and promoting mathematical thinking and developing mathematical language through talk tasks ✔
5. It hits National Curriculum aims!
By nurturing fluency and a growing confidence to reason mathematically through collaborative challenges (language rich environment) that promote acquisition of mathematical language particularly for those with English as an additional language, low achievers and less confident children. It develops the ability to apply maths to solve problems, to conjecture and to test hypotheses and experimentation with no fear of failure!
6. It promotes imaginative mathematical thinking!
7. Twitter loves it!
Oak Tree Academy in Spain, fully 'onboard' with the #SwimmingInMaths #DeepDiveChallenge, check their blog > https://t.co/NfX5HLkvtG 🇪🇸#maths pic.twitter.com/RdNHvrrg0l
— Mr Keegan (@SwimmingInMaths) June 29, 2017
@StAnnesLiv
Look who came to visit us… Snorkeler Tom! #deepdivechallenge #MathsChallenge #developingourthinking pic.twitter.com/rdi68MXI9u— Miss Miles (@Y6Stannes) February 2, 2017
8. Colleagues love it!
9. The approach is transferable between subject areas!
It’s true! The Deep Dive Challenge is a great way to begin other lessons, why not ‘throw them in at the deep end’ of ‘Grammar’, ‘Science’, ‘Computing’ etc!
10. It’s perfect for Parental Involvement!
Take it from me, once you have a consistent, child friendly, high-impact approach to teaching maths that fosters a love for maths across your school, it’s a great opportunity to invite parents in to experience maths like they have never experienced themselves.
Children teaching their parents!