Laura Whittaker is the Maths Coordinator for St. Marks Primary School in Cumbria. This year, Laura worked with Chance to Shine coach Jonathon Osbourne to capitalise on children’s excitement during coaching sessions and engage them in additional maths learning. Jonathon worked with small groups of children to help apply maths learning to real life situations sing the Chance to Shine teaching resources.

“This year, Jonathon supported our staff with small group maths work using the cricket learning resources. This was great as the children were extending or reinforcing their maths learning in a fun and stimulating way. The children are certainly keen for more!

“Over a few weeks, I worked with Jonathon to trial different approaches – which resources would work best for children of different abilities.

The first week we weren’t quite sure where to pitch it so it was a bit of trial and error until we found something that worked. “We started with a small group of more able children because they needed to be pushed further with their maths - in their SATs this year they are expected to get greater depth, which means they’re good at maths but they should be working at a higher level. So, this was really good because it pushed them on but it was engaging and they really enjoyed it. “We ended up doing it with the other groups too, of all abilities, because they were quite jealous. They were like, ‘Oh it’s so unfair!’ They were desperate, saying ‘when is it our turn?’, because they love cricket “The fact they were doing maths without realising, it was the best really. They just thought they’d been selected for a bit of extra cricket training. And then at the end we talked about how maths is really important in cricket and they were like, ‘Oh yeah’.

Jonathon is good at that in his coaching anyway - he really does bring maths in naturally so they did start to realise that maths is useful in real life.”