Targeting Number aims to provide supplementary number activities for pupils aged 11 to 14.

The teacher’s guide presents 90 lesson plans organised in nine sections of 10 lessons. Each uses a class activity to focus on a specific concept or skill. The student’s books provide related practice exercises: Calculations covers number operations, and The Number System addresses place value, fractions, decimals and percentages.

The core of this material is in the lesson plans and the photo-copiable demonstration sheets and resource sheets in the teacher’s guide. The class activities may involve stages of whole class or pair work. Each lesson plan includes a reference to one or more appropriate warm-up activities taken from the back of the teacher’s guide.

The lessons provide support and practice for pupils who need it, but there is not enough differentiation in the lesson plans to cater either for the more able pupils at age 11, or for the least able. For the more able pupils there are open-ended questions at the end of each page of exercises, but many of these are trivial and repetitive.

As a resource to support numeracy skills in key stage 3, this is interesting, but I hope to see better in the future.

Peter Johnston-Wilder