Core Workbook 2 (x8) Pounds 5.25. - 602 26467 7.

Core Plus Workbook 1 (x8) Pounds 3.95. - 602 2685.

Core Plus Workbook 2 (x8) Pounds .95. - 602 26465 0.

Teacher’s Resource Book, Pounds 14.75. - 602 26465 0.

National Curriculum Ginn Mathematics: 2+ Textbook 1 - 602 26644 0.

Textbook 2 - 602 26645 9. Pounds 2.99 each.

Teacher’s Resource Book Pounds 15.50 - 602 26646 7 Age range 5-7

Open-ended questions and challenging investigations are the best starting points for infants, writes Shirley Clarke.

Ginn’s new infant resources consist of an attractive but traditional maths scheme for reception classes, and some material for brighter infants which is more adventurous but still mainly focused on pencil and paper activities.

The New Reception Ginn materials follow through 56 maths topics such as colour, sorting, matching, ordering 1 to 5 and so on. Exploration and use of the calculator and work with big numbers are not included, so the link with the national curriculum is not as good as the publisher claims.

There is a very attractive Big Book with transparent overlays, worth buying on its own to use for maths discussion. However, in this scheme the Teacher’s Resource Book suggests that each Big Book page is used for baseline assessment purposes and to link with a page in the child’s Core Workbook. There is first a structured discussion, followed by children completing a photocopy master or a page of their workbook. The focus on discussion is welcome, but the guidance consists of lists of closed questions such as “How many?”, “Where are?”, “What colour?” and so on.

Although the baseline activity looks like a record-keeping dream, I have to question its reliability. One-off class or group discussions and worksheets which can be misunderstood or copied are nowhere near as useful to teachers as assessments made through talking to individual children while they are taking part in normal classroom activities.

For example, determining whether children know the four primary colours can be established by talking to children about their drawings, their crayons, their clothes, or most classroom equipment, rather than through elaborate structured activities.

The Core Workbooks are simple but unimaginative, with children doing the usual drawing round, mapping and drawing of specific objects. There are a few follow up activities listed in the Teacher’s Book to correspond with most of the pages, which seem to be the best part of the scheme. This is where children get away from the abstract world of pencil and paper and closed questions and get to build and make things.

However, even here there are no investigative activities, but rather “safe” situations such as “Take a line for a walk on a piece of paper and paint the area in different colours”, or “Fill some cups with sand and label them 1 to 8. Label some cardboard flowers 1 to 8 and match the flowers to the cups.” I would like to have seen these activities as the starting point, followed by discussion ideas to lead the children into more mathematically challenging activities.

The Ginn 2+ materials are designed for more able pupils who have completed Ginn Mathematics 1 and 2 successfully before the end of key stage 1. There are two brightly coloured pupil books with enough activities to keep able children busy, but will doing more workbooks extend their mathematical thinking?

The positive aspects of the materials are that everything is thoroughly explained in the Teacher’s Resource Book, there are good contexts in the pupils’ books, such as using dotted paper and multi-link cubes and the questions to the children are clear. The less positive aspects are the unimaginative use of the calculator, comprehension style questions, set mainly as “word sums”, and the lack of investigative mathematics.

Shirley Clarke is Inset Co-ordinator for Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London