NATHALENE Williams, a Maths and Reading Coach at Kruisfontein Primary School in Humansdorp, enjoys the challenge of helping young learners develop positive attitudes towards mathematics – the best way to motivate children.
As a mathematics coach, Williams works with small groups of learners from Grades 1 to 3, in close partnership with the teachers, to ensure that lesson plans are coordinated and each child’s progress is supported. She has a mentor in addition to the teacher support and supplementary resources.
“I try to motivate the learners by using games, which allow them to operate on different levels of thinking, while learning from each other and reducing the fear of failure and error,” says Williams, a qualified ECD practitioner who is currently studying towards obtaining her Grade R Teaching Diploma.
“I believe that maths is an imperative part of development as it teaches children to use number concepts and skills to explore, as well as to develop confidence in their ability to think things through.
“I love working with children and especially enjoy seeing how they develop holistically in the areas of literacy and numeracy, which play such an important part in a learner’s life.”
Willliams has been working at the school since 2016 as a Reading Coach, and also began to teach maths this year as part of the Jeffreys Bay Wind Farm’s Foundation Phase Programme. She is one of various maths and reading coaches, and aims to help improve numeracy understanding at foundation phase and to create a critical awareness of how mathematics relationships are used in social, environmental, cultural and economic relations across schools in Hankey, Patensie, Sea Vista and Jeffreys Bay.
She says that she finds the biggest challenges faced by the children in this subject include abstract concepts of time, ordering numbers, remembering concepts and rules, mathematical word problems and the inability to visualise numbers.
“The importance of acquiring maths and literacy skills during the early years is well-known, if a strong foundation is to be built and children are to be successful in learning mathematics at higher grades,” said Hlengiwe Radebe, Economic Development Director for Jeffreys Bay Wind Farm.
