A game changer for homeschoolers and tutors.
Regardless of what your young people already know, Number Hive is a fantastic way of gaining fluency and building confidence in the foundational areas of numeracy. It can be used for a 5 min warm up activity, or for an entire lesson of rich conceptual learning.
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Number Hive as a tutoring or home school tool
Number Hive is fantastic as a homework tool for many reasons. Firstly, it is engaging and won’t feel like homework. Secondly, it is personalised and can meet them where they’re at. Thirdly, it doesn’t just encourage rote learning, but builds fluency with deep understanding of the key numeracy concepts.
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Encourage students to begin with the ‘practice’ option in the Number Hive lobby. Progress through the levels of difficulty as they grow in confidence.
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Once feeling confident, they can move on to playing friends using ‘host a game’ and then into the Global Hive once feeling very confident.
Why it works
Supports foundations
The world over, Mathematics is structured as sequential learning. Students need strong foundations in the basic operations in order to be able develop concepts further. It falls down if they fail to gain mastery of a concept, leaving them with foundations that are shaky at best.
Supports Confidence
This lack of understanding undermines confidence and can even lead to an anxiety that impacts their learning, limiting their growth and success.
Encourages autonomy
The most foundational of all concepts is around numeracy and number sense. Number Hive builds, returns and reinforces learning at the students pace, helping them evolve deep understanding, and most importantly, the kids are having fun and driving their own learning.
It’s built from experience
Number Hive is designed by a veteran Mathematics teacher who saw this problem in the classroom time and again.
For enrichment
Number Hive provides endless opportunities to enrich the learning for students, regardless of their prior level of understanding.
Play a game with the student and ask questions as you play.
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What is the best starting strategy?
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Why did you move there?
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What factors should I avoid to block you here?
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Show a game scenario and discuss the best option for the player.
These types of questions lead to rich discussions which fosters that deep conceptual understanding of the concepts.
As a diagnostic tool
Often we don’t know exactly where a student is at with their understanding. The temptation is to set an anxiety inducing timed test. This hinders progress and the crucial starting point of the relationship. This rarely gives us effective formative assessment. Pedagogically, a far better way of assessing student understanding is through observing, asking questions of students and then following these questions up to find exactly what they know and where they need to be met. Number Hive provides the perfect opportunity to find out where a student is with their understanding of multiplication. Simply play a game and observe. Are there obvious products that they avoid? Ask questions as to why they made a certain move? Ask about different factors to be avoided etc.
Number Hive is a low stakes, low risk method that encourages a positive relationship and provides a safe formative assessment experience so you know how to provide them with the optimum next step in their learning journey.
The best way to start to build multiplication knowledge is through classic manipulatives and charts.
Use concrete manipulatives and charts to build multiplication knowledge. Once they are starting to gain a little understanding, Number Hive can be used to practice and reinforce the knowledge in an engaging way. (down the track we can talk more scaffolding here with our other options; eg 1-10)
Here are some ideas on how you can scaffold the learning journey with Number Hive.
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Explore factor pairs and perhaps even a times tables chart with students prior to playing.
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Start off in the Number Hive ‘Practice’ game on the ‘easy’ level. Let the student have the factor pairs or times tables chart in front of them.
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As they start building in confidence, you can start removing these resources and slowly increase the level of difficulty.
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Once they are feeling more confident and have a solid level of mastery, they can try playing against someone they know using the ‘Host a game’ option.
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Finally, when they are feeling very confident and at the point of feeling safe to take risks, they can enter the Global Hive through the ‘Play Online’ option in the lobby.
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