Maths by Month – June (updated 2020)

The final month of the school year is almost upon us, and as usual, this heralds the last installment in this year’s series of posts designed to explore the Operation Maths topics on a month-by-month basis.

As teachers and families, around the country, continue to support children via distance learning, we have continued to roll out our latest series of posts entitled Dear Family. Each of these posts focuses on a specific maths topic, and provide practical suggestions as to how families can support their child’s learning, along with providing tried and tested links to useful digital resources. We hope that, in some small way, they may prove to be beneficial, both now, and in the future.

The posts in the Dear Family series published to date, focused on the topics of weight, capacity, 2-D shapes,  3-D objects, number sentences and equations, money and chance. Some of these topics also feature in the plans for this coming month (see below). The next Dear Family posts, currently in development, will focus on the topics of time, patterns and lines and angles.

Please feel free to share any of the Operation Maths blog posts with colleagues and members of your school community, including parents and families, whether they are Operation Maths users or not.

Book lists not finalised yet? Please consider Operation Maths, Number Facts, Bua na Cainte, Exploring Spelling, Let’s Talk Literacy, Explore with Me and My Learner ID. Click on the links for more information and to view sample pages from each program and/or contact your local Edco reps for samples.

Operation Maths for Junior Infants to Sixth Class:

• Junior Infants: will be reinforcing their understanding of the numbers 0-5 via the topic of money.
• Senior Infants: Further Counting and Numeration, Comparing and Ordering and Combining and Partitioning of numbers to 10; patterns (different arrays of the same number, colour patterns, number patterns, odd and even numbers); time (one-hour intervals).
• First Class: Weight; Patterns; 3-D objects (in particular, connecting their understanding of 3-D objects to their understanding of 2-D shapes)
• Second Class:  More Place Value to 199; Area; Lines and Angles (revisiting half turns and quarter turns)
• Third to sixth classes: Operation Maths 3-6 is specifically structured so that the programme can be completed by the end of May, thus covering all of the topics in advance of the standardised testing.
  Depending on your own specific school circumstances, you may find yourself looking for inspiration to fill the maths lessons from now until the end of month. Whether you’re an Operation Maths user or not, there are a whole suite of suitable ideas on this blog post.

Operation Maths users can also access custom-made digital resources to support these topics. To access these resources, log into your account at www.edcolearning.ie, select the At School Book/Pupil’s Book for your class level. Then you can either:

• Navigate to the relevant page in the book and click on the hyperlink to open up the specific activity for that page in a new tab.
• Click on the Edco Resources icon (on book cover image on left-hand side) to open the list of all the digital resources associated with that book.

Other suggestions for June:

• Maths outside: typically this is the time of the year when teachers are bringing their classes outdoors for learning. Since the children are at home, longing to get into the outdoors, why not encourage them to safely do some of these activities, with their families, while on their outdoor walks.
  • Outdoor Classroom Day 2020 was officially celebrated on May 21. If you missed this day, you can still access their resources with suggestions for all subject areas, including maths, https://outdoorclassroomday.com/.
  • Maths Around Us activity ideas in your Operation Maths book and/or the the Maths Around Us videos accessible at https://www.edcolearning.ie/
  • For more ideas, check out this post Maths fun in the sun