Monthly Archives: January 2020

Maths by Month – January (updated 2020)

Happy New Year!

And welcome to the first post for this calendar year, but the fifth post of this school year, designed to explore the Operation Maths topics on a month-by-month basis, giving teachers greater insights into the concepts at hand, when they are most relevant.

While each monthly overview will specifically zone in on the Operation Maths topics for that particular month, the information and suggestions will be relevant to ALL primary teachers, whether they are Operation Maths users or not.

Operation Maths for Junior Infants to Sixth Class:

• Junior Infants: Analysis of Number (Numeration) looking at the number five, Comparing and Ordering and Combining and Partitioning amounts up to five.
• Senior Infants: Analysis of Number (Numeration) looking at the number eight; Comparing and Ordering and Combining and Partitioning amounts to up to eight; Weight
• First Class: Counting and Numeration (within 99), Place Value within 60, Operations (including developing mental strategies for addition and subtraction within 20) and Comparing and Ordering (comparing sets and identifying the inequality)
• Second Class: Money, Symmetry, Operations (addition and subtraction without renaming, including subtraction as deduction) and Fractions.

• Third class: Fractions and Length
• Fourth class: Multiplication & Division and Decimals
• Fifth class: More Division and Data
• Sixth class: Multiplication & Division and Fractions, Decimals & Percentages

Operation Maths users can also access a class specific, month-by-month list of relevant links and online resources via the Weblinks document, accessible on www.edcolearning.ie. 

1. Log into your edcolearning account
2. Click on the At School Book/Pupil’s Book for your class level.
3. Click on the Edco Resources icon (on book cover image on left-hand side)
4. Select Weblinks from list of categories and then click to download the document.

• Also accessible on  www.edcolearning.ie.  are the custom-made digital resources to support these topics. These will all be viewable when you click on the Edco Resources icon as directed above.

Other suggestions for January:

• Chinese New Year (Year of the Rat) starts on Saturday 25th January. Children in older classes could be encouraged to explore the Chinese numeration system and to challenge each other to translate standard numbers into Chinese numerals.
• Backward Day! The 31st of January marks this little-known celebration which encourages us to reverse or invert the typical societal rules. Without encouraging anarchy, there are obvious opportunities here to explore symmetry, mirror writing etc.
  • Challenge your class to write out the capital letters of the alphabet backwards; not only starting with z but writing each letter as flipped image of itself, as shown.
  • Ask them to consider in advance which letters might appear the same when flipped backwards and what letters will appear different.
  • The children’s letters can be checked using small plastic mirrors to see if the image in the mirror is correct.
  • The children can also be asked to do the same thing with the digits 0-9 or even bigger numbers.
• While it’s not guaranteed, there could be snow! The Routty Math Teacher has a whole library of Solve it Friday puzzles many of which align themselves with feasts and seasons. Sign up here to get access to the library and then check out weeks 16-19 for snow-themed puzzles.