We want every Australian student to love maths by using materials to both make sense of it and genuinely enjoy the sequential journey of learning it. We want to hear cheers at the start of maths sessions. We want to see materials (not worksheets and not click-technologies) in every primary classroom engaged in mathematics. We want to hear students reasoning with each other and thinking out loud (not silence), and see students recording their mathematical findings while using materials (rather than memorising processes and algorithms before developing conceptual understanding). Ultimately, we aim to grow a generation of children who, as adults, will still love maths. 

 

To achieve this, Top Ten was founded and is still owned entirely by Australian primary teachers to support fellow primary teachers with the huge task of day-by-day planning for exceptional, engaging and differentiated explicit teaching maths lessons. All Top Ten numeracy coaches are experienced primary school teachers, with additional university-level qualifications in mathematics, in addition to their primary teaching qualification and years of classroom experience. For over ten years, we rigorously tried and tested our sequential hands-on, explicit teaching units in our classrooms across Australia, before offering these as a planning package to support all schools.

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Our units include colour photographs of classrooms in action during materials-based lessons, daily modelling guidance by numeracy coaches and maths leaders, and a range of student work samples for each lesson. Our aim is to ensure that primary teachers have enough time and energy to deliver engaging and high-impact maths lessons that target their students' sequential points-of-need. To do this, we remove a significant portion of the burden of planning from scratch and the time-consuming search for explicit teaching lessons that genuinely work in real classrooms.

Our first goal is to grow each teacher's confidence and repertoire by making numeracy coaches' classroom modelling and coaching accessible to every teacher every day. This is achieved through illustrative photographs of lessons in action, student work samples and the ongoing practical professional learning provided throughout each unit plan. 

 

Our ultimate goal is for every Australian student to fall in love with maths and become numerate, and to assist (in whichever way a team prefers to use our planning units and resources) every Australian primary teacher to achieve this. 

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In all, there are over 1100 explicit teaching, concrete, real-life linked lessons, organised into developmentally-sequenced units; with 500 materials-based lessons for the early years and 600 real-life contextualised lessons for years 3-6.

 

To maximise your teams' time, each of the 1100 lessons includes:

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• a specific learning intention and lesson-specific maths vocabulary highlighted at the start of each lesson plan 

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• success criteria within the formative assessment cross-checks linked to each unit 

• photographs of concrete and explicit teaching classroom modelling, student work samples and how to address common misconceptions 

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• warm-up games and an engaging hook or tuning-in element 

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• questioning and immediate feedback tips, as well as ongoing misconception alerts 

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• clear, workable and flexible differentiation planning through pre-planned enabling and extending prompts to support and stretch each task. These flexible lesson progressions and scaffolds facilitate ongoing in-class intervention and extension within every lesson plan; and such extensive and consistent differentiation planning greatly supports Australian teachers to cater for the wide ranges of points-of-need across a single classroom. 

 

Please visit our school feedback and student gain results page, and feel free to download the sample packs on our early years and numeracy library pages to share and try the sample lessons with your teams.