Making the Invisible Visible: How Interactive Presentation transforms maths lessons

We’re making children’s thoughts and thinking visible on the screen, but also visible to everybody else.

– Rachel Walters

Interactive Presentation gives every pupil a chance to fully participate and engage in their maths lessons. Made for adaptive teaching, this interactive teacher tool perfectly mirrors the textbooks making it easier than ever for teachers to customise the lesson to their pupils. As Rachel Walters said in the PD Pop-Up session ‘Interactive Presentation: A Digital Space for Thinking and Doing’, Interactive Presentation helps with “making the invisible visible” by supporting differentiation and boosting pupil engagement.

In this blog, we will go more in depth into what Interactive Presentation is, what the benefits behind it are and how you can easily use it in your classroom.

What is Interactive Presentation?

Interactive Presentation offers a new way to lead the Explore task — the real-life anchor task that begins every Maths — No Problem! lesson — with digital, engaging manipulatives and customisation features that help personalise the lesson to your pupils and their needs. It’s the digital, interactive version of the Explore task that you can easily access from the Teacher Hub or directly through the Pomegranate platform.

Interactive Presentation was created to make it easier to support pupils’ deeper understanding of maths concepts, but it’s not meant to replace anything. It’s a complementary tool for teachers and pupils to enjoy that enhances the Maths — No Problem! lesson structure, allowing you to experience the textbooks in a new way.

The top five benefits

1. Supports the CPA approach

With simple, built‑in manipulatives you can move and zoom in on, Interactive Presentation makes leading the Explore task and sharing visual representations easier. Need to model with large quantities? You can represent big numbers digitally without juggling trays of counters or tens frames at the front of the room. Drop in a tens frame or part–whole model, or any manipulative you desire, beside the prompt, rearrange objects to show alternative groupings, and zoom in as needed to make it easier to see. Interactive Presentation supports the CPA approach and helps to make thinking visible for the whole class with a flexible toolkit of manipulatives.

2. Boosts collaboration

Interactive Presentation boosts collaboration and encourages oracy in maths by making pupils’ thinking visible to the whole class in real time and turning individual strategies into shared discussion points.

Capture and display different approaches side-by-side on the screen, annotate them and use the digital manipulatives to compare methods. This strengthens collective reasoning and shared understanding. Pupils can reference one another’s strategies and refine them together, everyone working together on the board.

3. Makes differentiation easier

Interactive Presentation lets you adapt questions and task on the spot for support or extension while staying aligned to the textbooks, making differentiating your primary maths lessons and adaptive teaching simpler. Because it mirrors the Explore task, you can quickly tweak what pupils see and do without needing to rebuild anything.

Need to scaffold? Use base ten blocks or part–whole models to break ideas down. Ready to extend? Switch to place value disks, bar models or make quantities larger to push reasoning further. With flexible manipulatives and customisation features, you can meet learners where they are and keep everyone moving toward the same goal, just at the right level for them.

4. Maintains the lesson structure

The pre-made Maths — No Problem! presentations perfectly match the textbooks, helping pupils follow along. Each lesson is consistent and uncluttered, streamlined to encourage pupils to explore productively, with essential elements fixed in place and only the key teaching objects movable. This helps to keep discussion on track and to avoid overwhelming pupils. Children have often mentioned how they love the consistent structure of the lesson. Interactive Presentation maintains this lesson structure, adding onto the Explore task in a new way pupils will love. As the teacher, you control when to pause, prompt and reveal, so the pace and questioning of the lesson matches your class’s needs, which you know best.

5. Saves prep time

Many teachers copy or scan parts of the textbook to present on the board so they can lead the Explore task with their class. Now with Interactive Presentation, the Explore task is all ready set up for you to present on the board. With a click of a button, begin exploring as a class. This saves you prep time and allows you to better focus on teaching with a tool that supports you and your practice.

You can even easily print off any lessons if you want to create any handouts for pupils to work on, making classroom resources even easier to get together.

How to use Interactive Presentation alongside the textbook

Interactive presentation introduces the lesson concepts through a problem and focuses on the process and not just the answer.

What this looks like for different year groups

Key Stage 1: Year 1

Explore prompt: How many pieces of fruit are there altogether? Can the fruit be put on the plates in different ways?

For this lesson, there is a bowl and two plates which are fixed in place. These are designed to demonstrate a number bond in a real life scenario that pupils will recognise. The fruits are all moveable and there are no rules on how pupils can organise them, whether that’s by colour, shape or size. Play around with the class and see all the different versions they can make — Rachel Walters recommends using speech bubbles to capture pupils’ thoughts on the screen to reflect back on later. Then, easily pop-in a number bond, or any manipulative of your choice, next to the problem to represent the fruit.

Where previously teachers might have discussed the image or use physical manipulatives to represent the fruit and move them around that way, now with Interactive Presentation you can easily move the fruit in the Explore task before moving to manipulatives. This allows pupils to really build their understanding with the CPA progression.

Key Stage 2: Year 4

Explore prompt: Emma bought these items. How much did she pay altogether?

On the left-hand tool bar, click more and it will open up more manipulative options. At the top there will be a ‘money’ tab. Once you begin using this feature it will show up in your toolbar so you can easily find it the next time.

Have the pupils in your class share how they make £1.26, £2.70 and £2.61, and follow along with their progress on Interactive Presentation using the money manipulative feature. For example, add £1 coin, 20p coin and a 5p coin to the screen. Spend some time going through the different ways you can make up these sums, before moving onto the question itself of addition.

You might start with grouping like coins together, for example all of the pounds, all of the 20p coins and so on. Once you put the pound coins together, a pupil might say they know that makes £5. Instead of having to pull out a five note and delete the pound coins. You are able to select the pound coins and press the ‘Combine and Split’ button that hovers over the coins. This flips all of the coins into one five note.

This feature seamlessly represents how £1, £2 and £2 together make a five note in a clear way. And if you try to combine money together and it does not make that number, it will rearrange the coins to show that is not possible, allowing pupils to experiment with money sums in a really visual way.

Tips

• Interactive Presentation automatically saves your work allowing you to pick up where you left off.
• Rename lessons from the top menu so your versions are easy to find later in the 'Continue where you left off...' section.
• Use Print in the top toolbar to save a copy of your worked example or class discussion.
• Use Chrome for best performance.

Want to learn more?

Watch Rachel Walters’ video walkthrough to learn more about the features of Interactive Presentation and how to best use them in your classroom.

Rachel Walters is also hosting a webinar called ‘Talk, Teach, Transform: Enhancing Maths Lessons with Interactive Presentation’ in January that will go into more detail and give you the chance to ask any specific questions you might have. Register now for the 27 January 2026 webinar!

Need more support?

We’ve created Support Pages to guide administrators and teachers through getting started and using Interactive Presentation. Read through our step-by-step instructions or watch one of the video tutorials.

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