Ronit Bird’s approach to teaching numeracy – and the idea that drives all her books – is that we should be teaching for understanding, in a hands-on and multisensory way, and not through rote-learning or memorised procedures. Working with concrete and highly visual materials, such as Cuisenaire rods, is an ideal way to explore numbers and the relationships between numbers in a way that enables children to discover facts for themselves and develop true conceptual understanding. Offering plenty of mathematical games is a good way of motivating children to spend time on those facts or topics that they need to practise, without their realising how much learning and reinforcement is happening as they play.
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