Our primary video lessons were created during Lockdown 1, primarily for teachers needing to set work that children could access from home. Hours of careful collaborative planning went into creation, thinking about the activities, the representations and the sequencing.

We hope teachers will continue to benefit from this work, reducing the need to reinvent the wheel. But what a video cannot do is to create that sense of a learning community. As the teacher of your class, you assess understanding as the lesson progresses, you know each pupil’s strengths, weaknesses, and prior knowledge, and you carry understanding of home situations. All this allows you to tailor teaching accordingly.

In the current period of mostly remote learning, teachers are increasingly finding ways to build a classroom community despite being physically remote from most children. Where you might not so much be ‘setting’ maths lessons but delivering them, here are some ideas for using our lesson videos to save time.

• In live or recorded teaching, you could play clips from the relevant video in your own lesson but pause as appropriate to give clarification and support where you know that your pupils need it.
  
  For example, in this Key Stage 1 multiplication video, the teacher explores three groups of five, using this image:

When the teacher on the video suggests children pause the video to fetch objects to make their own three groups of five, this might be a moment to make the lesson more interactive. Pupils could discuss what they’ve found or take a picture to send to you to share the following lesson. Children love to see each other’s work, and even more, to see what each other is doing at home.

• You may prefer to deliver the lessons yourself so that you can add additional steps or further activities. The slides used in each video are all available for download as a PowerPoint file so you can use the images and adapt for the needs of your pupils.

• Children in need of a little more support or confidence could watch the relevant video in advance of a lesson, so that they feel more confident accessing the concepts during the lesson.
• Similarly, videos could be used as catch up for pupils that have missed a lesson.
• For staff who are working with children in school, videos could be used but paused for children to carry out activities with equipment available in school.
• Some parents have requested longer tasks for children set at the end of the videos. You could provide deeper tasks based on the relevant section of the Primary Mastery Professional Development Materials. Subsequent lessons could involve children sharing with one another how they completed these tasks at home (or in school).
• Are you working with a student teacher or NQT? Could a set of video lessons help them to understand the sequencing of appropriate small steps for a concept they are going to teach, or provide a useful contrast to the way they observe you teaching a topic?