Threading a Curriculum:

Weaving Fractions Through the Scheme of Work

In our Stage 7 curriculum, certain topics like fractions are - on the surface - 'missing'. I was initially worried about this gap. However, it's led to a different approach: with the aim of. ensuring that students’ prerequisite knowledge is always checked, it became bigger than that and started to develop a threaded curriculum.

What exactly is a threaded curriculum? It’s a concept I’ve most recently heard used by

Lee Wheeler

and

Kristopher Boulton

, but I first encountered it in Mark McCourt’s book, Teaching for Mastery. The core idea is that instead of a lesson focusing on a single topic, like solving equations, you have multiple strands of content running through a period of time. If fully deployed it’s probably the ultimate form of an interleaved curriculum.

It sounds amazing, but where do you start in practice?

Weaving the Fraction Thread

I’m not claiming that we’re anywhere near the utopia of a fully threaded curriculum. Instead, let's look at how we’ve started weaving fractions through our work, remembering that there is no standalone fractions unit in this part of the scheme.

Inspired by the OAT maths curriculum, in the introduction to algebra unit of work we introduced our students to reading and writing fractions from words to symbols. The real shift, however, came with our probability unit.

Of course, a key prerequisite for probability is fractions. So, as we continued through the unit, I leaned into checking for understanding on fractions, each time deliberately connecting this knowledge to the probability concepts we were studying.

Students practised labelling probability scales and number lines with fractions. This small-step approach gave fractions a new lease of life, moving away from how I’ve previously taught them as isolated skills with contrived applications. We had already broken down the language of probability into small steps, including the written form of fractions, something I feel is a frequent oversight in the curriculum. We expect students to use the language of fractions orally without ever getting them to read and use the words themselves.

As we continued through the probability unit, we practised addition and subtraction of simple fractions, including subtracting fractions from one. Each time, the practice was done in isolation before being immediately applied to the probability work.

Later in the scheme, we have a unit on substitution. From a previous class, I knew that division of fractions was a significant weakness. Inspired by the success of the probability unit, I knew I had an opportunity to thread fraction work and took the opportunity to close this gap. I taught this conceptually, addressing the challenge of dividing by a fraction and the often-surprising result of the answer being larger.

After this, we introduced students to reciprocals. Just as we taught that subtracting is the same as adding the inverse, we now have dividing is the same as multiplying by the reciprocal. This work on fractions was embedded directly within an algebra unit.

It's worth remembering that the majority of fractional arithmetic students need is, in theory, taught at primary school. The key component for us, then, is the application of fractions. Over time, I'm now also trying to thread reading and writing fractions, including mixed numbers, into our daily Do Nows. This ensures that when units involving those key mathematical ideas come along, students have a strong starting point we can easily refer to and build on.

Conclusion: Success and Sustained Learning

This is just a small-scale example of how fractions have started to be threaded throughout one part of our curriculum. For me, this means students have seen success in both fractions and the work they've been studying. We haven’t pushed fractions work to the point where everyone is fed up with them and students believe they 'can’t do fractions.' Instead, we have applied and deepened their knowledge and their belief that they can do both elements of the work.

When you start to pull together multiple threads in lessons, using models that hold true over a sustained period, I believe you can start to build a genuinely threaded curriculum. To support this, our new booklets have dedicated support pages, and our PowerPoints have checks for understanding and are hyperlinked to jump to appropriate content, allowing us to skip support work if a class doesn’t need that level of depth.

Anyway, using PowerPoint to build responsive lessons is a post for another day.