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I’m not ashamed to admit that I have always found a certain joy in numbers. Â I’m certainly no mathematical wizard, but I still know my square roots from my cosine curves, things which I’m sure many of us (myself included) wondered why we needed to know when still at school. Â Before I became a stay at home Dad, my chosen profession was as a games programmer, and so mathematics came in very useful for that, especially the aforementioned square roots and cosines!
My Mum first gave me an interest in maths, giving me simple sums to do before I even went to school, but it was at primary school that I really got hooked on maths. Â Sure, reading, writing and art were fun, but my school taught mathematics using a series of exercise cards known as SMP cards which I loved to bits.
SMP stood for Schools Mathematics Project, although many kids made up their own ideas for what SMP stood for – Stupid Maths Problems for example. Â My school issued us all with yellow covered exercise books containing paper covered in a grid of 1cm squares. Â In the front cover was stapled your SMP worksheet, which listed all the SMP cards divided up into categories such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions and so on.
When you fancied doing some maths (or the teacher told you to do some) you took a look at your worksheet and got the next card you were supposed to do. Â The cards were covered in plastic and stored in little boxes on a shelf. Â After you completed the card you took your book to a teacher to mark it. Â The teacher had a massive answer book which was kept away from the kids so you couldn’t cheat. Â Assuming you got enough right the teacher would tick that card off on the sheet and you could then do the next card.
Once you had worked your way through each of the categories you started again with a harder set of cards. Â Each card was given a number to identify it, and if I remember correctly this was prefixed by the number of the difficulty level, so the easiest set of cards were number 1-1, 1-2 etc. whilst the next set would be 2-1, 2-2 and so on. Â A bit like progressing through the worlds on Super Mario Bros!
The cards were a fun way of working as each child progressed at their own pace, and for those that really enjoyed it (i.e. me) you tried as hard as you could to get onto the next set of cards before your friends did. Â Perhaps they ought to bring this system back – it might improve the standard of mathematics are our kids have.
I too loved maths at school and helped me evolve through my working career as an Electrical/Electronic design engineer to my current profession as a software engineer (although not in the gaming field – which would have been nice).
To be honest, I’ve never heard of these, although I can’t remember what I did in Primary school between 78 and 82.
This rings a bell somewhere along the line….
If i remember correctly, the first box was orange, the second was lime green and the third was purple. Funnily enough, i also remember a certain, not unpleasant, smell from the card boxes. Funny what you remember, lol.
Yes, I’m pretty sure you have the colours right. I think the fourth set were a particularly nasty brown colour (no prizes for guessing what everybody at school called that colour) and the fifth a pale blue.
I remember the fifth level had some weird charicatures of TV comedians Little and Large teaching you how to do long division. At least, that’s who they looked like to me.
We had the red and the green box, and the smell was nice, I used to always flick though the cards, and take in the smell, whaere could I get hold of them
Andrew Mckenna. amckenna1@hotmail.com
Wow. In a fit of wistful harp music and wobbly dreamlike misty sceanery I typed in SMP Maths Cards for reasons that escape me completely. I NEVER expected anyone else to remember them. Thank you.
That’s quite alright Paul. I love it when somebody else also remembers some of the more obscure things I write about!
I still use the cards( sets 3, 4 and 5) in a yr5/6class. The kids love them and we have had excellent SAT results.
I am desperate to get replacement sets-almost impossible.
See, the old methods are still the best!
I’m glad to hear that your classes are doing so well with the SMP cards. It was how I learnt maths and I’m very grateful to them.
I remember these cards. In fact I was hoping to use them for home school for my son, does anyone know if a set is available second hand (Have tried but no luck) , or whether they can be scanned or copied?
I dare say that most of these cards are probably now land fill, as I suspect most schools that had any will probably have dumped them when they were deemed no longer necessary. A real shame as it seems a lot of people seem to fondly remember SMP cards.
I seem to remember that there were about five boxes. Think the purple one was the hardest, but I’m sure there was a brown box as well.
“it might improve the standard of mathematics ARE kids have.”
What about the standard of their English?! 😉
I seem to recall the order of difficulty being something like orangey-red, green, another colour I can’t remember, brown, pale blue.
As to the comment about improving OUR kids English, I feel somewhat embarrassed but thank you for the correction. I’m off to write some lines now…
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I will proofread my posts.
I remember them fondly. I especially enjoyed the Shape and Graphs sets of cards in Level 4.
The cards may not still be available but SMP still produce some great resources. http://www.smpmaths.org.uk. Not much for primary though.
I loved this scheme at Primary School and it was the saving grace in my mathematical progression since we seemed to have a new teacher every couple of days (very boy heavy class!). Every child knew which card they needed to take next and worked through it at their own pace.
I asked a Maths lecturer about this scheme recently and he told me that it was one of the reasons the National Curriculum was designed; so many children did the work out of sequence, or not at all, meaning huge gaps in a child’s maths education. My primary school did this scheme and 7-a-day etc series which I loved too; lots of ticks on every page of your maths book.
Not as keen on the worksheets used today by my own children. No chance to learn how to organise your own work in a book, not enough time spent consolidating key operations with repeated practice and learning so many things (that I did at secondary school) before they are ready for the ideas. Perhaps the lack of skill in laying out their own work accounts for why they are so reluctant to apply the maths to problem solving as they have no ideas of steps to follow? Perhaps this comes later than year 3?
Glad someone else remembered this scheme!
My little one isn’t old enough for school yet, but I’ve seen some of the homework my nephews are set and to be honest it all seems a bit too freeform to me. They’re told what they should, could and might be able to do, but really it’s up to the child to put what they think. This doesn’t feel like it will stretch the kids to improve if you ask me, they’ll do what they think they can get away with and stop.
Hi everyone,
I remember these SMP boxes although can’t recall the colours.
I also remember orange maths books in the infants school, I’m sure they were called fletcher books. Does anyone else remember these? Noone else I went school with can remember them, but then I do remember the weirdest of things most of the time lol
Fletcher books? Hmm, doesn’t ring any bells I’m afraid. Anyone else remember these?
I used these cards when I first began teaching in 1979. I am looking for copies of them as a supplement to the scheme I use now, but without any success.
My question on this is about a similar color-coded box set that I used in elementary school I tried to do a search on it, but I no clue as to the name of the actually product, or the company that made them, so my searches have been a giant fail.
However, reading these comments make me think that the two types of school box sets were done by the same type of company. Maybe The only difference with these box sets is that they weren’t math, they were reading/literature. There cards in the box were different colors: orange, red, blue, green, brown, purple…they were stories on cards. I remember liking the purple one the best I think, because they were the more Fantasy genre type of stories.
(I’m also wondering what region/country this site is based in, I remember that some do say “maths”, instead of “math”.
)
Good question Rachel. My primary school certainly had a similar set of cards for reading and literature.
I believe they were called School House (but I may well be wrong), and they came in a big corrugated plastic box which was style to look like a school building. The cards were colour coded, and I think the idea with them was you were supposed to put an acetate sheet over the top of the card and fill in the blanks with a special pencil, which could be wiped off the acetate when completed. That’s about all I remember of them though.
And FYI, I’m based in Berkshire in Southern England, and we most definitely used the term “Maths” for Mathematics. I always thought “Math” was the US way of saying it.
Spike, I remember the orange Fletcher maths books. Unfortunately didn’t come across the coloured cards but wish I had. We were the first year in senior school to be taught SMP maths in our newly found status as ‘Comprehensive School’, changed from ‘Secondary Modern’ back in 1975. Gosh, I feel old!
I remember these they were awesome we used to be jealous of the children who got onto the more advanced levels. Awesome things they should bring them back for sure kids these days use calculators instead of their brain to claculate thigns….
Wow – great comments and seems like everyone was fond of these!
We used to call them Fletcher Cards at our school not sure why and being a real saddo i just loved them. We used to have races to see who could get them done the quickest and whp was on the highest level. We were only allowed to get one sheet at a time but to advance better I used to pick two at a time and start doing the second sheet straight away.
And yes i agree with you all that repetition of these helped undermine my understanding of maths in a good way.
Just taken my eldest son out of state school into a private school and they do a similar thing – they call it mental maths so no working out on paper just lots of repetition of varying structures of maths problems over and over again. they do it in morning studies and for home work.
oh and by the way if anyone says to you at primary stage (son is 8) that private school doesn’t make a massive difference tell them they are way off the mark1
I would love to get hold of a complete set. I now teach maths for a living! I attended a school in Peterborough where they used SMP cards then we relocated to Devon where they did not. I was 18 months ahead of my classmates as I had been able to learn at my own pace and loved maths. Unfortunately I moved to a school that believed we should all learn at the same place so I sat and did very little for almost 2 years; getting into trouble for being disruptive because I was bored.
These were early examples of active learning – I can still remember sellotaping my fingers together for a maths experiment and having to lie on the floor to be drawn to work out estimating distance! Everyone in my class fully engaged with maths from an early age yet these sets are no longer available!!!!!
I’d love a set if anyone is selling one or has a scanned set… If you can help me sam.elestial at colchester dot ac dot uk …
I’m 34 and I was in junior school in the middle 80s. I remember the SMP cards! It was a wonderful idea that allowed kids to work at their own pace. I was never particularly good at Maths, but I do remember enjoying working my way through the cards. My family moved in 1986 and my new school used the Fletcher books, which were not as good for me personally. My secondary school used the SMP books, which were also good, but by then it was all a bit beyond me LOL. I have very happy memories of being at school in the 80s. In fact, being a kid in the 80s was such a joy, I wouldn’t swap it for anything.
Does anyone remember SRA boxes for reading around the same time as the SMP ones. They were large cards with a ‘story’ and questions at the end with corresponding smaller, long cards, with the answers on them. I remember you do the large card, then go up for the answer card and mark your own work. I also remember lots of kids sneaking the answer card from the start and just copying it, lol.
I’m not sure if I’m thinking of SRA cards or not, but see my response above to Rachel. I remember a set of cards which we always called “School House” (more details above) which may be the same thing you are thinking of.
Hi,
Yes, we used the Fletcher books & I have now collected the complete set. Never seen the SMP cards but I do remember the reading/comprehension ones, can’t remember what they were called but the harder ones, which were what I used to use, were olive, brown & purple (not necessarily in that order). I think the red ones were the easiest but we didn’t use them when I was in the lower forms.
Please Jane S – where can I get my hands on the Fletcher books as I had these too in primary school and I can remember them like it was yesterday – I have been searching but to no avail
I remember the smell of the smp cards like it was yesterday i use to stick my head in the box hahahahaha
yes they should bring them back
I remember SRA cards – and think we also had School House cards as well – I specifically remember 2 boxes of cards that were different. There was also a set of cards with words on them that we had to copy down and learn – these cards were colour coded for difficulty, from red through to purple – anyone remember them? I also remember with fondness the Sound Sense books, and some workbooks in the first couple of years of primary school, where there were sentences that instructed you to colour shapes and pictures – e.g. colour the square orange (but I don’t know the name of the books).
With regard to SMP – does anyone remember some Scottish Primary Maths workbooks – red 1-4, then green 1-4, and a blue text book after? They seemed to come in part way through my final year at primary school – which was 83/84. Any help for any of them would be appreciated!!
Hi there I was just wondering if anybody knows where to get hold of the smp cards would love to learn my kids with them they were great when I was at school cheers carl
Yikes. I was just googling SMP cards and came across this. Would love to know if someone could get hold of them again.
I remember them being in colour coded boxes. I was in competetion with my friend to see who could get the furthest through them before the end of the year. LOL. Inky Swots that we were.
I seem to remember that the first box (although I never did it as I came to the school in last year of primary school) had one section (arithmetic?) that had 50 cards!!!!!
I too was Googling SMP and found my way here.
I spent most of my primary school years in Hertfordshire, then did the last two years in SE London. I had never encountered SMP until then but in that two years I got thoroughly hooked and completed the whole lot!
I would love to find a set now to teach my own kids with them. It seems to be that the schools no longer have time to actually teach our kids much!
i remember the characters Annie Add and Lizzy length! and slogging my way through the 50 cards in addition in set 1.
I used Fletcher Maths books in year 1 and at the start of year 2. Then we used the SMP cards. Orange Box, Lime Green box and Purple box. I loved doing the cards and moving on up. The boxes in the late 70’s early 80’s were brand new to the schools. I don’t think I liked the smell. But I did like competing to finish the cards and get to move on. In middle school we didn’t use cards or modern books. We used books from the 1960’s or 50’s it seemed. I didn[t like maths then. Funny.
Delighted to have found this site – I was starting to think that I was imaging the cards! I don’t remember the smell – and given I only used them in 1979/1980, our box must have been new. Sadly I had to leave my Middle School in Norwich after the first year and my Country Primary school didn’t use them. I’m pretty sure I was on the purple level, by that point – but I remember racing through them to get to the ‘practical’ ones. I remember a card on estimating – I had to estimate how many teaspoons of sand it would take to fill up an old ice cream tub – and then I had to use teaspoon and sand to see if I was right!! Brilliant!
I used Fletcher books when in the infant classes at my primary school. At some point SMP was introduced and after that we moved onto KMP which was a very similar Maths programme. At the time I thought KMP stood for ‘Kent Maths Project’ (I went to school in Kent) but now that seems somewhat unlikely. Anyway I also remember doing SRA English cards in the top class of primary school (and possibly earlier).
We also did Richmond tests in the Summer term – they were multiple choice tests and some people called them ‘Baked Bean’ tests because you had to shade in an oval marked A,B,C or D for the answer which looked a bt like a baked bean. I also remember the Rainbow reading scheme, moving onto Bronze, Silver and Gold before becoming a (drum roll) free reader! Happy days! I now teach and would love to see some of these resources again but from previous posts that seems unlikely!
Wow, I had forgotten all about these cards. I’m a high school
Math teacher in the US now. I remember pretending that I didn’t measure the playground properly with the trundle wheel just so I could go outside and do it again.
I have young children now and I wish they did math this way. My daughter is very good at math. Skipped a grade and is still top of the class. I wish she could just progress through the topics at her own pace.
I can’t believe I forgot about these cards. Wish I could find them.
One card that always sticks in my head is an orange one with loads of divers lined up on a diving board haha!
At secondary school in Scotland in years 1 and 2 we got KMP.
We also got normal maths lessons called “consolidation” to prevent gaps.
I think the card colours were: white, green, blue, red, yellow, purple.
I started on blue after the initial test and just started the purple box by the end of 2nd year.
I remember some cards had accompanying tapes where the narrator sounded like Melvyn Bragg.
e.g. Blue card on decimals: “Decapod and decagen, decagen, Decapod and decagen, decagen and even though our number system’s based on the numbers one to ten, one to ten”.
Loved these……. If I could buy them now I would
Best maths teaching aid ever. I completed them
I too remember SMP cards, which is how I came across your web page.
I was actually googling on the off chance there would be a set of the old cards randomly for sale on eBay. Even though my kids are all grown up now, I’d like to show them how it was done ‘in the olden days’. I would likely be a little older than you (the page author) as I was born in 1970. I remember doing the SMP cards whilst a junior at school. I also remember some thin, narrow but quite tall books which were simply known as ‘Vocabulary Books’. Words were my strong point rather than maths. Myself and a lad named Karl were books ahead of everyone else in the class. I enjoyed competing with Karl but I’d find that as soon as I got onto the book he was on, then he would advance forward one book. It was very frustrating but I never gave up.
I hated school. I pretty much gave up. I had my most despised teacher for two years, once as a 1st year Junior and then, due to a school reshuffle, I got her again as a 4th year junior. She was such a bully, I gave up the will to learn. I felt that whatever I did wasn’t good enough. She picked on me, never gave me class points for good work which the others seemed to get just for being in school, so they got treats, I got nothing. Apart from the vocabulary books and reading, I pretty much quit everything and switched my brain off. If I was told to do maths, I’d not do it, I’d get a book out and learn from that instead. I think by the time I moved up to secondary school, I believe the damage was already done. My vocation was to rescue animals which I’ve gone on to do. Yes I’ve got the basics of maths to get by in life .