Back to articles & videos

Revisiting computation strategies is easy with Think Mentals!

Think Mentals 20/8/20

The COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted how you explicitly taught mental computation strategies while students were learning from home. Not to worry! It’s easy to revisit these strategies throughout Think Mentals’ Revision Units and get your students’ mental computation practice back on track.

1. Identify which strategies you need to revisit

Use your students’ results from units completed at home to determine which strategies you need to revisit. If you’re using Think Mentals Digital Classroom, view the Class Assessment Results table for a snapshot of performance across the whole class. If you’re using the Student Workbooks, collect your class’s books and review the Student Assessment Profiles (at the back of the book) for an overview of each student’s results.

2. Find out when the strategies are revisited

Use the Strategy Overview Guide to find out which strategies are being revised in upcoming Revision Units. While these units do not introduce new strategies, they systematically revise previously taught strategies. For example, if you identified that your Year 4 students struggled with any of the Place Value strategies, the Strategy Overview Guide shows that they will use the strategies again in Units 23 and 28.

3. Decide how you’ll revisit the strategies

There are a number of ways you can revisit a strategy. Use these whole-class and individual approaches to help strengthen your students’ mental computation skills.

Explicitly reteach

Before beginning the day’s set of questions, explicitly reteach the strategy that is needed to answer the questions quickly and effectively.

If you’re using Think Mentals Digital Classroom, project and discuss the strategy lesson (video, strategy slideshow and worked examples). If you’re using Think Mentals Student Workbooks, go through the projectable strategy snapshots from Think Mentals Answers as a class.

Prompt self-guided strategy refreshers

Before beginning the day’s set of questions, inform students of the strategy they will use and encourage them to go back to the associated units of work and look at the strategy learning resources if they feel a bit stuck on the first few questions.

If you’re using Think Mentals Digital Classroom, project the strategy snapshot for students to refer to throughout the lesson. If you’re using Think Mentals Student Workbooks, have students flick back to the strategy unit in their workbook to review the snapshot on their own.

More Think Mentals articles & videos