PARENTS and children are getting together to tackle numeracy in a Blackburn school.

A 15-week course at Daisyfield Primary School is being run in partnership with the Basic Skills unit at Blackburn College and will be making use of our NIE resources to improve skills in every-day maths.

The school's pack of the Thursday edition of our Pick and Mix material, along with a delivery of our newspaper, focuses on weekly features including our jobs ads pages, the property supplement, internet web site reviews and food news. Over 30 numeracy and literacy boosting tasks are set out in bite-sized pieces suitable for KS2 pupils up to adults.

"The material is particularly well suited for use with parents and children together," said Melanie Hussey, Blackburn college tutor. "The newspaper is a familiar and interesting source of information and making use of it helps to take away any fear of maths."

Class teacher at the school, Mrs Brenda Walmsley, is convinced that developing the maths skills of parents will help them to support their children with their homework.

Our Pick and Mix resource sets out a different range of literacy and numeracy activities on each day of the week, linked to features and information; giving a total of over 130 ideas to improve basic skills with the bonus of keeping up with local news. For details of this or any of our NIE resources, or for a no-obligation viewing in your own school, please contact Rita Shaw.

Picture shows (from left) Mariyam Patel, Masum Jalgaonkar, Adeela Patel, Brenda Walmsley, Melanie Hussey (Blackburn College lecturer), Motasim Jalgaonkar, Faisal Mahmood and Shakila Malik.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.