Moving on with numbers : from 10 to 20.

 I am starting to look at ways to practice numbers to 20 with Year 2 at Culcheth Primary School. This particular class is now in its second year of learning French and have become very confortable with numbers to 10, so to keep them interested and making progress I’m going for ‘bigger numbers’.  I think that particular class is ready!

This is what I’ve done so far: 

• First, I’m not doing a whole 30 min lesson on numbers I’m treating it as a starter/ a warm up after singing our greeting song and personal information Q&As. So every week I’m doing about 5 minutes.

• Number song:

This song is already in my resources for Upper KS2 and children love it! 

As the children are getting more familiar with it,  I like to pause the song and ask the children what number comes next.

• Counting:

In KS1, we have a focus on ‘Harvest’ time in France and we have been talking about sunflowers and grapes and used it to practice counting, colours, etc.

One of the favourite activity of my classes is to count ‘things’ i.e sunflowers in a field, how many grapes on a bunch?

I ask the class how many we should count. They have to suggest a number in French between 0 and 20 and then they can come and count them out loud (with the class joining in) on the interactive whiteboard, marking them with the pen as they go along, then we continue until we counted all the sunflowers, grapes.

With Halloween coming up I thought we could count sweets, here is a PowerPoint of pictures of sweets you can use - if you like.

I like this approach of constantly revisiting things instead of ticking things off as done plus it means you can make your resources last longer – I’ve used the same picture of a sunflower field for the last 3 lessons!

I’d reckon by Christmas most of the children will be able to understand/ remember their numbers to 20.