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I’m not ashamed to admit that I have always found a certain joy in numbers. 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. 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. 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. My school issued us all with yellow covered exercise books containing paper covered in a grid of 1cm squares. 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. The cards were covered in plastic and stored in little boxes on a shelf. After you completed the card you took your book to a teacher to mark it. The teacher had a massive answer book which was kept away from the kids so you couldn’t cheat. 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. 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. 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. Perhaps they ought to bring this system back – it might improve the standard of mathematics are our kids have.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:38 am
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.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
This rings a bell somewhere along the line….
April 10th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
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.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
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.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
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
July 28th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
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.
July 30th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
That’s quite alright Paul. I love it when somebody else also remembers some of the more obscure things I write about!
August 12th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
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.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
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.
September 3rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
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?
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
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.
November 25th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
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?!
November 25th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
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.
January 22nd, 2010 at 7:07 pm
I remember them fondly. I especially enjoyed the Shape and Graphs sets of cards in Level 4.
February 20th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
The cards may not still be available but SMP still produce some great resources. http://www.smpmaths.org.uk. Not much for primary though.
May 4th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
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!
May 7th, 2010 at 8:00 pm
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.
June 29th, 2010 at 3:33 am
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
June 30th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Fletcher books? Hmm, doesn’t ring any bells I’m afraid. Anyone else remember these?
July 14th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
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.
October 14th, 2010 at 4:49 am
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”.
)
October 14th, 2010 at 9:26 am
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.
January 19th, 2011 at 10:20 pm
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!
April 16th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
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….
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:01 am
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.
that private school doesn’t make a massive difference tell them they are way off the mark1
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
November 14th, 2011 at 12:27 pm
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 …
November 21st, 2011 at 5:35 am
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.