Number Train Blog

After leaving teaching, I was lucky enough to have a year to enjoy 'being a stay at home mum', or 'early retirement' as a few friends called it! My eldest was in reception and my youngest was in preschool for first half the week. For the other half of the week, I enjoyed taking my youngest son to gymnastics, swimming and an interactive story time class. We still talk about our 'mummy days' now - lots of great memories! He is a 'summer born boy' (July baby) so we wanted to help him to start school with confidence and taking him to these classes really helped to develop his social skills and independence. As parents we are often spoilt for choice with so many classes to choose from nowadays, however time and money is limited and so Number Train was designed to offer parents a 'one-stop shop '!! The sessions were originally designed to tick a lots of boxes so as well as being educational, they offer the chance for little ones to sing, dance, make and shake too! Having two young children myself, I knew how short their attention span can be so the classes were designed to be fast and action packed to keep the children active throughout. With a different theme each week, the children are kept engaged and it seems the adults like the variety too! Number Train was originally designed for children aged 3+ to attend in the year before starting school. However in recent years, more and more children are starting at aged 2.5 years and are staying for longer. Although they are already at nursery / preschool at this age, many parents are still keen to attend classes 'with their child' because this is their final year before they go off to 'big school' and it's a very precious time. A lot of what I planned in the early days came from my experience as a primary school teacher - I have seen so many children at different ages from reception right through to GCSE finding maths tricky and when working with them, the problem is that the basics are often weak so they have nothing to build upon when the curriculum starts to get harder. Like anything, as soon as something is difficult, our attitude starts to change. It is my aim to try and change this so that more children start school with confidence in the basics and can hopefully continue to love maths as they move through school. Being a maths graduate (aka ' one of the maths geeks ' by my good ol' school friends), headteachers presented the 'opportunity' for me to use my maths background to lead Assessment and Maths across school. (Basically the jobs no one else wanted!) These roles gave me a great overview of learning across the whole school and two weeks out of my Year 6 classroom in the Summer Term to do 'whole school data analysis' was secretly quite a nice break! It is with this overview of maths in mind, that I planned Number Train, I knew exactly what was coming further up school for these young children, how it all fits together using the basics.... AND how tricky it gets in KS2. My oldest is now in Year 4 and during homeschooling today he has been tackling improper fractions - something which many of my Year 6 pupils found tricky a few years ago so its now wonder he found it difficult! As mentioned in a previous blog, the expectations have increased at every level in primary maths and I am sure you will agree that the basics are important now more than ever!

This blog is dedicated to all the teacher mums and dads out there who are juggling so much every day. I was in the thick of it just a few years ago so know exactly how hard it can be! I escaped the classroom a few years ago with no idea of what I was going to do next. Here is the start of my story... Why I escaped Back in April 2016, when my children were aged 5 and 2, I felt like I was a disillusioned Year 6 teacher. The Key Stage 2 'SATs machine' was in full swing in class and the expectations for children at the end of primary school were ever increasing. Every school was finding their own way with assessment and trying to raise standards to match the new maths curriculum - it felt a bit like the blind leading the blind at times and change for the sake of change. I was slowly becoming that 'cynical old teacher'! 2015/16 was another year of 'new' things being introduced from the government with little, if anything, being taken away hence an ever increasing workload. I always remember living at home when I was training to be a teacher back in 2001 and my parents being concerned about the hours I worked in the evenings and weekends "Surely you can't keep doing this, Annette" they said. You would think that like any new job, this would be the case at first .... everything is new and its a steep learning curve etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case and if anything the teaching workload just kept increasing year after year. As a young teacher, I was able to spend time working at night and knew that it was just part of the role - thankfully I enjoyed the teaching part and the rewards it gave. However, as soon as I became a mum, the time I had available became limited and my priorities changed. I was no longer just answering to Mrs Peterson in the classroom but also to mummy before and after school. And then having a second child who didn't sleep through made it even more fun! I sometimes wondered which days were the hardest - being in class with 30 Year 6 kids or being at home with a baby and a toddler! So after much thought, I took the first step and decided to leave the profession. It wasn't an easy decision ... I had worked hard for so many years, it was all I knew and I would miss the 'day job', the staff and the children. I didn't have a clue what was next so I started by taking some time to just focus on being 'mummy' to my boys which gave me a lot more time to think. During the first few months of being a 'stay at home mum', the cogs started turning and I knew that I wanted a project ..... something to fit round my family something which involved teaching children something where I could use my maths skills something that was term time only I wanted something to focus on so this is how it all began! Having worked with many children over the years, I knew how important the basics are in maths and with the new maths curriculum having higher expectations it seemed the basics would be even more important now! I set to work on writing a preschool maths programme and called it Number Train - the birth of my third child.