Mastering the four basic operations in maths

During this week's sessions I learned, among other topics, about the teaching of subtraction and division in primary school maths. This built upon my learning last week about the teaching of addition and multiplication. Maths is among my favourite subjects on the primary school curriculum. In fact, I have enjoyed the subject since my own days in primary school.

The sessions this week and last week interested me for two main reasons. Firstly, I have been giving maths grinds to secondary school pupils for the past seven years and I have seen pupils displaying a range of difficulties with these four basic operations. In particular, I have encountered many pupils whose knowledge of multiplication tables is quite weak, with such pupils relying heavily on calculators. The second reason these sessions interested me is that I noticed that there are now some different approaches to the teaching and explanation of certain operations to when I learned them in primary school.

This made me appreciate the importance of consistency in a child's learning, and that this takes place in two key ways. Firstly, as pupils move up class levels and to a new teacher, it is imperative that the school has a uniform, agreed means of teaching the operations to prevent the children being confused by different methods. Secondly, the class teacher must communicate with parents/guardians to inform them that the method they themselves learned may not be the method their children are learning in class. It would be useful for this parent/guardian inform to contain worked examples with explanations to aid this process. This will allow parents/guardians to assist with homework and promote learning in line with what is taking place in the classroom.

My main learning point was that pupils' learning in these operations begins in a rudimentary manner in Junior Infants with their introduction to the concept of number and continues all the way throughout their eight years in primary school. Pupils need to be exposed to problems with real-life examples and relevance to their lives.