Dear Ninja Teacher!
It’s great to have you on board with Numeracy Ninjas and I hope both you and your students are loving the resources. Thank you for signing up for the project and I look forward to giving you updates as the year goes on.
We hope that you’re getting on well with the Ninja Skill Booklets and the Ninja Skill Focus Worksheets. Do let us know if you have any top tips for running Ninjas efficiently so we can share them with our whole community. For example, in my own school we have found that collecting the Ninja scores once per week is a timeframe in which progress can be monitored, but valuable lesson time is saved rather than if we were recording the scores every lesson.
We’re also finding the greatest progress comes if you take a minute or two whilst class-marking answers to ask students which questions they’d like to know how to answer faster and then discussing strategies.
If you’re looking for some inspiration for turning the free promotional materials on the website into engaging classroom displays, check out these photos! Thanks to everyone for tweeting them out!
Numeracy Ninjas is now being run in over 370 schools worldwide! It is very exciting to be building a community of mathematics educators who understand the importance in raising their students’ fluency in numeracy. If you haven’t yet read the aims and motivations for the project, be sure to do so here: Project Aims and What is Numeracy Ninjas?
I’d like to share with you our vision for the project and where we see it going over the next year or two.
Online version
To support the skill booklet testing in class, we aim to build an online version whereby students can compete with each other whilst simultaneously practising their skills. In addition to being an engaging online space in which to improve their fluency, we also want to build diagnostic tools whereby the game records how long it takes each student to answer each type of question and then compares this with world average times for that question. Our aim is that after a sufficient time playing on the online game, students and teachers could download a diagnostic report showing the students’ strengths and weaknesses in individual skills. Students could then practise a focused programme of skills personalised to their needs.
Online timer and answers
Some of our users have requested that we build a page into the website which runs the five minute timer and shows the answers to a particular session, thereby doing away with the need for the PowerPoint. This is something we are going to look into over the next year.
Projector–based version
Some teachers have requested that we put the questions for each Ninja session into a PowerPoint, thus doing away with the need for the Ninja Skill Book photocopying if you have large enough interactive whiteboards for the students to see all 30 questions on one slide. Again, this is something we will look into in the future.
Ninja Championships
Some teachers have requested that we put on a National Numeracy Ninjas Championships in the summer term where schools could bring a team of ninjas to battle it out for the national title! We love this idea; realistically it’s unlikely to happen this academic year, but certainly something we could look into for 2016 – 2017!
At present we are busy working on weeks 11-40 of the Ninja Skill Booklets. We aim to have these published on our website by the end of the October half term in time for students to continue on from the first booklet. After this our focus will turn to completing the Ninja Skill Focus- Key Skills booklets.
As a little thank you for supporting the project, here are some discount codes to get 10% off the price of various products in the Online Shop:
Ninja Belt Reward Stickers- School Starter Pack (very popular): 9X4R2P6A9HTK
Grand Master 25mm Badges: ZVKJQX1GJPCL
Praise Postcards- Grand Master: 71GC4MWSBQ9Z
Praise Postcards- Numeracy Ninjas: NMURW8NTPB55
The codes are valid until 30 September. Student’s love the Ninja Belt Rewards stickers on the front of their exercise books; these are proving very popular with schools. We recommend the Grand Master postcards and badges are awarded to 2 students in each class each half term- one for the highest attaining, one for the most improved. There are also free Grand Master certificates you can download from the Promotional Materials section of the site.
Finally, do let us know how you get on! We want to take all of you on a journey whereby we grow and improve the project and the resources over time. Your feedback on impact and the practicalities of running it at the coalface are very important in helping us get it right for you and your students.
All the best,
Will & Jo