At Sumdog, we love hearing how teachers are using Sumdog with their pupils and the impact that it’s having.
Neil Kelsall works at Oasis Academy Limeside and is also a Specialist Leader of Education and National Lead Practitioner for Oasis Community Learning.
At Limeside, we’ve been enjoying using Sumdog as it gives staff a flexible way to focus on core mathematical skills, and that supports our maths mastery approach.
For some children, our teachers or teaching assistants may ask them to play the Sumdog maths games for 15 minutes a day, in a quiet classroom environment where they can focus.
While other teachers use it as a lesson by putting a skill up on a screen at the front of class, linking to what children need to know in their stage of learning and then help them consolidate what they’ve just learnt with 10-15mins of game play.
The platform helps children be aware of their own learning and we’ve found they enjoy the challenge and the coin rewards that we can allocate to them based on their performance. The free regional Oldham contests also inspire friendly competition between us and local schools.
Over the summer, Limeside focuses on supporting community-led and hub activities to help them get outside and have fun, something that is more important than ever following the effects of COVID-19 on children’s mental health and well-being.
However, now that our children have their own iPads, we’re likely to set our pupils a longer-style challenge of 1000 Sumdog questions to complete. We’ll encourage them to log-in and complete games to help keep them learning over the holidays as we know short bursts of just 10-15 minutes on Sumdog each day can have a big impact.
Sumdog is perfect for what Neil describes as the little and often practice that helps build fluency. Create personlised practice for your pupils in minutes and the best part is Sumdog does the marking leaving you more time to analyse the results and plan next steps.