A recent conversation with another teacher about ‘lazy planning’ has got me thinking about PixiMaths and my intentions of how best to use it. My plan was never to save teachers from planning lessons, merely to make planning easier, giving others something to start with and adapt. It's difficult not to be defensive about something that's taken me so many years to build. As maths teachers, we are really lucky. There are so many fantastic websites and resources that we can use to assist our planning (and make it better). Speaking to teachers of other subjects, other teachers are perhaps not as generous. Does this make us lazy? I certainly don’t think so. It makes me constantly want to develop my practice and alter my lessons when I see something better, or a method that I think might suit a class’s needs more appropriately. Without others’ generosity, I would be stuck in a rut, teaching the same lessons year on year. My personal documents area is a combination of several PixiMaths lessons (adapted many ways to suit different classes), resources found on the TES, and links to other amazing things around the internet. I couldn’t manage without Variation Theory or Dr Frost. I couldn’t imagine teaching younger year group with the MathsBot manipulatives. My lessons would be dull without Julia’s hooks. And this is just to name a few things I use on a regular basis! But I don’t just use these as they are. This is the key message of this blog I suppose. PixiMaths was never designed to be an off-the-shelf solution. I like to think that there are hundreds of tweaked versions of each lesson pack across the country to suit different teaching styles and classes needs. That’s my vision. Not lazy planning and teaching.