Sign In
Sign In
Register for Free
PrimaryMaths

Improve Maths Vocabulary in Primary School by Reading

We read information texts in science, geography and history, but how much reading do we do in maths, asks Matt Dix…

Matt Dix
by Matt Dix
Fractions medium-term plan
DOWNLOAD A FREE RESOURCE! Fractions KS2 – Maths medium-term plan
PrimaryMaths

I work in a large primary school consisting of children from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures right in the heart of Nottingham.

In fact, there are a total of 52 different languages spoken at school, and even with EAL training, EAL specialist Teaching Assistants, bilingual staff and translators onsite, our job has not been made any easier with a shift in the curriculum and a greater emphasis on vocabulary.

However, it is a challenge I relish and one in which the children in school constantly astound me. Yes it takes a huge amount of effort to get children to make the expected standard in their second language, some of whom have only just arrived from overseas, but it is possible for many of them.

I salute all of those children who try their very best but either fall short or indeed just make it over the line. As a nation, speaking two languages is not something we can proudly call an English tradition, yet we expect so much from the children who have only just arrived on our shores.

Interestingly, even beyond the KS2 Reading SATs, vocabulary is becoming more and more fundamental in all areas of the curriculum.

The 2018 Reasoning Paper 2 and 3 this year was incredibly word heavy with a large range of unexpected words.

Contexts included: going to concerts, measuring alligators, Earth and Mercury, big cats, collecting eggs, The Angel of the North, vegetable gardens and sponsored running events!

All this even before they needed to understand the typical mathematical definitions (eg symmetrical, equivalent, sequence, symbols, vertices, translated, improper et al).

Whilst teaching maths last year, I noticed how often I was defining and discussing maths vocabulary during lessons, often going off on tangents trying to put one word into a variety of contexts or examples. This led me to consider other ways for children to recognise these words.

I decided to go ahead and write five short stories with mathematical vocabulary used throughout. This placed the concepts in a real-life context and allowed children, first and foremost, to try to identify them and then match definitions to the vocabulary inside the stories.

For children needing more support, these words had already been identified, making the process quicker but just as challenging.

Needless to say, children were incredibly excited to be reading stories in a maths lesson but also grateful for the language and context which acted as a key to open up the aspects of maths they had been struggling with.

This freed children up to use their competent arithmetic skills to solve problems they could not comprehend.

There are lots of resources to support maths and for enhancing vocabulary but, for me, reading vocabulary in context and reading in all areas of the curriculum, as widely as possible, is key.

We read information texts in science, geography and history. How much reading do we do in maths?

Our Maths Vocabulary Reading Comprehensions are fictional stories to contextualise the words, but why not read about the history of the metric system?

Why not study Descartes and the idea of mapping, Florence Nightingale and the importance of using statistics or the work of Pythagoras?

Let us read the biographies of Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace. Let us make maths more than just about numbers.

Matt Dix is a Year 6 teacher and one third of Mr A, Mr C and Mr D, a musical trio that create literacy, maths and science songs and accompanying resources. Check out their website at mracdpresent.com and follow them on Twitter at @MrACDPresent, and you can buy their ebook for just £3 at KS2 Maths Vocabulary Reading Comprehensions.

You might also be interested in...