On Coat Hangers, Clothes Pegs and a Poorly Projector

On Thursday the bulb in my classroom projector, not unlike myself it seems at moments recently, announced that it had moved beyond its recommended usable life. Awaiting its replacement, my planning this week, has moved away from ITPs and Smart notebooks, to perhaps the most flexible investment I have made in recent times, in terms of classroom numeracy resources.

Not digital at all, at least in the computing sense, this tool set consists simply, of a set of plastic coat hangers and 2 sets of coloured cloths pegs, one white and one green. Thanks has to go to colleagues on a recent Y3 Strategy day for introducing these. It is amazing what these things can be used for. Indeed almost anything you can do on a 0-20 bead string, or a bead bar, you can essentially do with these. Setting up numbers of pegs that rely on counting in multiples and then remainders is my current class's favourite thing, right now.. making say 17 in multiples of 3, with the question "what can you see?" Unleashes a world of responses, around the ways in which students have come to recognise the number, and is beginning to support mental processes around multiplication and deriving number bonds to 20. It may also be a nice precursor to meeting the dreaded division including remainders. Presenting the same number on different coathangers, in different ways, eg multiples of 2 and five for example extends this, and is really helping my support group to see how "clever Counting" can help them make their informal and mental calculation processes more efficient. Commercial bead bars and strings are amazing resources to have around, but I really love the flexibility this tool offers to play with visual number patterns, counting, and number grouping. We have also been using them to support individual and paired work, around rounding and partitioning, in deriving number facts that cross ten boundaries, as well as supporting the consolidation of number bonds and their stories, to support empty number line work.

This week we are working on Fractions, and so alongside dominoes etc they will be used to look at doubling and halving among other things. Bead Strings, Bead Bars really useful tools... But sad as it may sound.... I am loving my coathangers and pegs...