It is an obvious fact that young children learn the incredible feats of walking and talking through copying those around them who can already do it.

And yet we continue, in many of our Maths lessons, to have children learning and practising skills on their own in silence!

Many teachers address this problem by introducing group work, where children tackle activities together in pairs or teams.

But unless you are careful, what often happens is that the more confident children dominate and 'do the work' and those who are less sure become increasingly less secure and less able to contribute.

The solution is to get children from the earliest stages confident in talking about their thinking. This can be encouraged by using teacher-led dialogue activities like How many each and altogether? and How many fingers?

Later, when you introduce children to working in pairs or teams, you need to establish a culture where it becomes the responsibility of each team member to ensure that all the others are engaged in the thinking process and fully understanding all the ideas.

The photocopiable investigations that you will find here have detailed teachers notes with suggestions for encouraging dialogue and collaborative working, and the online investigations have regular pause points called 'think and talk' when children are encouraged to share their thinking with their partner or team.

The activities for older pupils will support you in helping them to develop the skills to explain their thinking using writing, diagrams, calculations and tables and lead them to the point where they are able to make their own decisions about how to record their ideas.

"People could challenge themselves to do harder questions and learn more so when they are older they would be awesome at maths and maybe if they had kids they could teach their kids some maths." (L - age 7)