As autumn arrives, the coolness of October is gradually felt in Guangzhou, but the G1 students' enthusiasm for learning and exploring at school remains high. After returning from the National Holiday, we have gotten to know each other further and are committed to creating a safe and harmonious learning environment.

In Maths, a growth mindset is very important. Therefore, at the beginning of the semester, we organised a series of activities to help students develop their growth mindset. For example, through the game of counting collections, students experienced solving the same problem using different strategies. As the number of items increased, they wondered if there were quicker ways to count. During the counting collections activity, students brainstormed and they found that besides the familiar "counting by ones" strategy, they can also count by tens, by fives, and by twos.

In Maths class, we learned about numbers to 10. Through a series of activities and games, students explored different ways to represent numbers, such as using numerals, words, ten-frame, and pictures to represent the same number. They created their own number flowers to display the numbers they drew and further familiarised themselves with English-written numbers up to 10 by playing Bingo. G1 students also discovered how to compare numbers and quantities using one-to-one correspondence and learned to identify "greater than" "less than," and "equal to" through the story of "The Hungry Crocodile." While studying number patterns, students observed various patterns and summarised the definition of patterns, deepening their understanding by creating patterns using different learning materials. This series of number exploration activities further developed students’ number sense.

Recently, we have been learning addition and subtraction within 10. Through reading the picture book "The Dreams of Gugu and Dandan," students discovered different ways to decompose numbers and helped Dandan find all the different ways to divide 10 sheep without missing any, training their sequential thinking in the process. In learning addition and subtraction within 10, students engaged in exploratory activities and discovered various methods to solve addition problems, such as counting all, counting on, number bonds, and using number lines. They discussed the connections between different strategies to choose the most effective strategy that suited them for solving addition problems. Later, G1 students practiced addition through various games, such as board games, rolling dice game, and Bingo.

Additionally, in terms of mathematical instructional routines, G1 students began to engage with the routine of "which one doesn’t belong?" They found different answers and explained their reasoning by doing “think-pair-share”, which helped develop their critical thinking skills. In upcoming Maths classes, G1 students will learn more maths routines to enhance their mathematical thinking abilities.