Prime Colours
First
You must learn to Practise
Practice does not make perfect. It makes permanent. So it is important to practise in the right way. This course will show you how to practise mindfully, practise by play and practise anywhere so anyone can develop the habits of a mathematician.
It takes Practice, Practice, Practice
Mindful Practice
Transform how you think about your ability to do maths by mindfully training yourself to learn and feel number facts differently.
Practice by Play
There is no more effective a way to practice deliberately than with play. Through play, mindless repetition can turn into something meaningful.
Practice Anywhere
Put a few cards in your pocket and you can practice anywhere. A spare 30 seconds can be used to develop your ability to work with numbers.
Who is it for?
The Prime Colours system is designed so parents can be fully involved in their children’s number sense development. It can be especially helpful in Keystage 2/3 or from age 7 to 14 or from the point that you are learning skip counting and thinking about learning multiplication. It is designed to create a more robust understanding and faith in number operations so that children do not have to rely on rote memorisation as their only support for deeper conceptualisation.
What can you learn?
Multiplication is much more than just repeated addition. Learn to work with multiplication facts in the same way as you would work with counters or blocks to give children a concrete experience of numbers, their relationships and their operations.
If prime numbers can be learnt as more than just a definition, they can have a massive impact on how we understand maths. Prime Colours gets you to understand the concept of primes by the experience of playing games and working on problems with the cards. By the time you are ready to learn about prime numbers in school or when studying for exams, they will be second nature.
Learning number bonds to 100 is really useful. It helps us to understand the structure of our number system and perform maths more fluidly and creatively. With Prime Colours, you will get to know the numbers from 1 to 100 as characters with relationships to each other.
Factors and multiples are as important a concept as 1 to 1 correspondence is in developing early number understanding. Unlike developing early number, it’s harder to gain an experience of factors and multiples. Prime Colours helps you to see the web of relationships between numbers. This is essential in developing more sophisticated concepts in maths.
The ratio between 2 numbers becomes visible with Prime Colours, and as easy as working out the difference between two numbers. In fact, ratio is just another way of comparing numbers. We’ll introduce the idea of ratio and you’ll see how easy it can be.
Prime Colours is an alternative number and arithmetic system. It is so useful to be able to look at things in a different way. Prime Colours offers an extra perspective on numbers.
In this course, you focus on developing the practice to enable you to internalise the numbers. Once you have done that, Prime Colours can open up nearly any aspect of arithmetic.
How does it work?
Improve your habits
Your habits are the behaviours that you will fall back on. Your maths habits will dictate whether you give up and rely on current knowledge, or try something new and learn to play with numbers. Good habits are easy to live with and hard to gain so it’s an investment!
Your journey into Prime Colours will begin by developing habits that make it easy to regularly recall and think about numbers in short bursts allowing your unconscious mind to make the links that will help you to progress.
Enhance your practice
Make the time you spend pracitsing count. Practising recall of facts is important and valuable. To really make your practice as effective as possible, you need to try different modes of practice.
Regular consolidation of facts that you know is the first stage. Try this first thing in the morning and last thing at night. You will build on this as you get to know more numbers. With Prime Colours you support this by testing and training your instant recall system.