It's been frustrating for me to search endlessly for ideas on how to teach Functional Skills maths without relying solely on outdated handouts from the days of Adult Numeracy qualifications - don't get me wrong, a majority of them are still useful but I think we have a new breed of learners; ones who want to learn for themselves and who are adept at finding things out for themselves. I am one of those learners too and so I want to feed the enthusiasm of new students in September in a way that will engage them in their (re)learning of maths from the start.
How do I do it?
In my last blog post, I set out how I was going to find out about the sort of maths that is perceived to be used on a daily basis. Now I want to find out about my learners; what makes them tick, what are their interests and what will keep them attending my lessons!
I've just spoken with a few of my learners this morning who have just sat their Level 2 Functional Skills assessments and who I hope (in the nicest possible way) won't be back in September to re-take their assessments. I chatted to them about how I was planning on changing my approach to teaching so that they will be more in control of what they learn and how they learn about it - they were pretty interested especially when they knew I'd let them use their hobbies (fishing and football) in order to learn maths.
In every aspect of our daily lives we have to use maths. In every topic there is maths. In order to engage learners who previously did not get on with learning maths something has to change - I know myself that my hobbies include a ton of maths. I'm hoping to start a Sewing course at Totton College in October this year and just from writing my scheme of work and working with some of the textiles students in the evening class (as a volunteer) it's become apparent that a lot of people just don't get maths or have forgotten parts of it. The more I delve into it, I realise that I have so much I can work with. It's all about embedding it into their own interests.
Fingers crossed it works! I hope to be able to increase my retention and obtain some good pass rates for my students next year. Only time will tell...
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