English Maths

Maths are a great subject to work with CLIL! That's the conclusion to which I arrived after sawing a lot of examples of activities we can do to make our children learn maths in English in a funny and meaningful way. But in order to do maths in English, we have to consider that we have to introduce the concepts and skills one year after children have done it in their L1.

Why don't start by singing the song "Number Rhymes"? While it explains the story of a boy who caught a fish that bites him and that's why he let it go again in the water, children will be counting till number ten. This song attracts children's attention quickly as it is funny and the lyrics are easy to learn and mimic. It is a good way not only to introduce the numbers to the youngest students, but also a way to get their attention back when they are tired or distracted. The song and its video can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBJEfDdaGN0

The "Ten Frame" is another useful resource to practise the numbers in English and some operations such as addition, subtraction, ...etc. It consists of a frame made of 2 rows, each one divided into 5 squares making a total of 10 squares. It's important that the squares in total are 10 because it is a key number that allows students count in tenths and make them see that if 3 + 3 makes 6, 30 +30 makes 60, 300 + 300 makes 600 and so on, so that they only have to add a 0 at the end. Also, the fact that it is divided into 2 rows of 5 is key too. 5 is the number they can represent with their own hand and it will be easier for them to do both additions and subtractions because they will have in mind that 1 row is equal to 5, so that they only have to add the filled squares of the other row instead of having to count all the squares one by one. The frame is completed with the pictures of apples (or everything else) that you can hook in the frame to play with it.

With this frame, you can start doing simple activities such as make the children count out loud while you add an apple at a time. You can make them count forward or backward.

Also, if you have apples of different colours, you can make more complex activities. For instance, you can ask children "How many apples can you see?" while you add or remove apples of a different colour than the ones that were already hooked (if there were 2 red apples, you can add 3 green apples making a total of 5 apples). You can also ask children for the opposite "How many squares are empty?" or make them come to the board and tell them how many apples they have to add or remove "Take out 3 apples. How many apples do we have now?". By these exercises, children will be doing simple additions and subtractions. To see another representation, you can also place the apples bearing in mind the organization of a dice.

Once the children master how the "Ten frame" works because we would have been playing with it all together, it is a good idea to give individual little frames to each child or make them work in pairs. In this way, we will respect the different learning rhythms of the class and we will ensure that every kid has the opportunity to play with the "Ten frame". We can also do the same "individual work" in a more interactive way with computers as the "Ten frame" is available on a website that allows students to play with it online: http://www.nctm.org/Classroom-Resources/Interactives/Ten-Frame/

Another activity we can do to practise counting the number out loud could be "The Banana number". In this activity, you can make children count in fives and the number that would be the "5" of a round doesn't have to be said and instead, children have to say "banana". For example, they will start saying 1, 2, 3, 4, banana! 6, 7, 8, 9, banana!, 11, 12, 13, 14, banana! ... You can make them count in threes, in tens, ...etc.

Same kind of activity could be to make students count from one number to another forward and backward. With these type of exercises in which everybody participates, it is common that questions such as "Which / Who's turn is it?" appear. That helps children learn language structures at the same time they are practising maths.

Finding the highest or smallest number of a set is also a fun activity we can do. The teacher can write some numbers on the board, let children look at them during a minute, remove them from the board and finally ask them "Who can tell me which was the highest / smallest number of the set?". We can also do it with even or odd numbers.

To say the number that comes after or before is another example of activity. The numbers we choose doesn't have to be random. Numbers such as 409, 369, 3999, ... make children change the tens, the hundreds or even the thousands' units and that is more challenging than just saying the next number of the previous one. That can be also applied to the activity of saying the number between two numbers (5 - 6 / 21 - 30 ...) or the one in which they have to round numbers to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand.

Finally, there are different activities included in the type of "Write the answers on your chart". These activities are focused on working the mental arithmetic because children don't have to write the operation they do to get to the result and they just have to write the result (except for the children that have some difficulties in mathematics). In these activities, the question "Can you repeat, please?" is frequently asked because the orders are given orally instead of written.

The first activity that we did in relation to this kind was a "Set of sums". We design a grid made of 2 columns of 5 squares each one. The first column was for subtractions and the second one for multiplications. In the first column we saw specific vocabulary when talking about subtractions: take away and minus; and in the second column about multiplications: "x" times and by.

When correcting this activity, students have to make a tick if they get it right and a cross (and write the correct answer) if they get it wrong. The teacher can ask "Who wants to tell me the next result?" and also make them count how many ticks did they get and then ask them: "If you have all questions right, how many ticks will you have?" or if a student got 2 answers wrong, we could ask him "Why did you get 2 wrong answers?" and they quickly learn to say "I made a mistake / I didn't listen properly / I didn't understand it ...".

The last activity we did was about "problems resolution". Again, students should only write the result of the activity without the operation they do. In this case, it is important that students write what the number of the solution refers to. For instance, if the problem is talking about how many books a girl bought in a shop, the result should be "X" books. Having to write these words may provoke children to ask "How can we write .....?". Also, considering that the problem is only said out loud, it's very helpful if the teacher mimes a lot while she's reading the problem in order for the children to understand better the situation. 

Depending on the type of problems, you can introduce mathematical concepts such as half and whole (we did a problem that consisted on knowing how many whole apples will we get if we have 5 half apples). Also, when we correct the problems, it is interesting to ask children "How did you get to that result?" so that they do the effort to put in words the process they did in their mind. To do so, it's important that the teacher give them keys to explain the process: first, .... second / then, .... finally, ...

To end up with this post, as you have seen in the multiple examples explained above, there are many possibilities to do maths in English and by working on them, children not only develop their maths skills, but they also learn mathematic vocabulary and new English language structures that they will be able to use in other contexts as well.

Teaching language skills

Both as children and as future teacher's students, we all have heard about the language skills in English at some point, but on the last university lesson, we went a little bit deeper in this theme and we saw the relation between them, its implementation, and some more characteristics that I'm going to explain in today's post.

To have it clear from the very beginning, the four language skills are: speaking, reading, listening and writing. They can be classified regarding different aspects:

• When talking about the direction of communication, we found the productive skills (speaking and writing), and the receptive skills (listening and reading).
• Considering the mode of communication, we divided them into oral skills (speaking and listening), and written skills (reading and writing).

Although each skill has its own characteristics, they are not isolated from each other. On the contrary, some of them are strongly related as we could see below and this means that to teach them, we must take advantage of one skill to develop another one so that we combine activities involving different skills that are linked:

• Speaking, for instance, is necessary to write properly; if our children aren't able to organize their ideas while explaining them out loud, their writings will be also messy and incoherent. We should practise their speaking abilities in order to improve their writings too.
• Again, speaking is also very close to reading. If the students can pronounce the words correctly while they speak, it will be easier for them to have a good pronunciation as well when they read.
• Have a good listening skill can help the reading and speaking too, as it is necessary that students identify how the words sound to read and say them properly. It is important for students to have heard how to pronounce the words they are going to read in a text before doing it.
• Finally, the writing and the reading are also very related because students learn them simultaneously, although it is true that to write, it is necessary to know how to read because you should identify the graphic of a letter to write it. Also, a good way to start writing in English is by copying the words already written so that thanks to this repetition they will integrate how to write them.

Now that we have clear which skills does English have and how are they related to each other, we should ask ourselves which is the best way to teach them. As we have already said, some skills can't be understood without another so, bearing this in mind, the common steps to teach them are the following ones:

1. Listening and Speaking = the oral skills are the first ones learned by students and they should do it at the same time.
2. Reading and Writing = the written skills are the second ones learned as they are a little bit more complex and take more time to be mastered. They are, as well, learned simultaneously.

These steps are almost the same when learning the L1 and that's why we should always respect the natural way that children learn their first language to teach the second one effectively.

Besides most of the children learn the skills in the order mention before, we should know that some of them will suffer the "Silent-way".

This period happens when a new item or message is understood but learners aren't still able to produce it. As we saw in class, first the students will be able to understand the new item before they are able to produce it and use it in communication. The difference between being able to understand an item and being able to produce it is known as passive knowledge versus active knowledge. Teachers shouldn't force their students to skip the step of passive knowledge in order to produce texts and discourses faster because children can feel very pressure and that could block them even more. We should respect student's different pace to develop their skills by presenting material that doesn't require the students to respond verbally but allows them to show comprehension.

As a conclusion, we could say that teachers should always be aware that language has to be used in a communicative way and to do so, we must integrate all the skills in a natural way, what it is called "realistic communication". To do so, it is important to expose learners to a large amount of material (pictures, videos, songs, text...) using the new item, before they are able to employ it in communication because, as we have already explained, first learners absorb the new item on an unconscious level and after some time, they will be able to use it in a natural way.