Most teachers go into the new school year ready, organised and with their stationary all lined up. As a maths teacher of over 20 years, I know that my first lesson back with pupils did not often include using a calculator. However looking back I can now see that this was a mistake.

I truly believe that all parents of new, excited year 7 pupils try their best to fully equip them for their first day of school and for most students this includes a calculator. Show a year 7 pupil a scientific calculator and they tend to get very excited, remember that they may never have used a calculator in school before as all 3 of the year 6 SAT papers are non calculator, but far too often lessons in KS3 are based on non calculator topics and therefore they never come out of their bag. When we then want them to use a calculator very few have them. Why? Because we as teachers have not ever used them.

I used to always advise the parents which calculator to buy for their child by sending out letters to parents during year 6 induction days or putting a buying window on the online payment system in the first 2 weeks of school. Inevitably in recent years this was the latest Casio calculator.

In this blog I want to look each week at how we as maths teachers could be promoting the use of a calculator in the classroom alongside our normal teaching practice.

For instance in week 1, you may be looking at place value in class. Most calculators are set to show larger values separated with commas. The new Casio fx-83GT CW does not. This is a great chance to talk to students about the way numbers are written in different countries around the world and how many use the comma as a decimal point. This is why we should not be using commas in our numbers. The map below shows this clearly.

Did you know that on many calculators you can remove the comma and separate out the numbers? Here are my instruction cards for the latest versions of the Casio calculator.