Updated resource and some misconception chat : Significant Figures

I’ve been busy touching up some resources when I teach with them, and adding them to TES.

Significant Figures : I updated this resource with a much greater emphasis on counting the significant figures before doing any rounding.

I did this after having a bit of nightmare with my year 7 class teaching rounding.

If you collect misconceptions, though, look at this that came up

This was really interesting to discuss and talk about with the student. There’s clearly a procedural understanding here, but not an understanding of what the procedure is trying to do. I made sure to reinforce this by talking about ‘is this closer to 700 or 800?’ but I had a thought. Maybe my procedure is stopping understanding here. Maybe I need to think about how I present examples in the future.

Rationalising the denominator

Download the worksheet here

Thanks to @mathsiskind on Twitter for pointing out that I nearly uploaded this resource with ‘rationalising’ spelt wrong every time.

I am really liking forwards/backwards activities at the moment. Fill in the gaps etc. They can be great for a bit of scaffolding.

Not much else to say about this. Get in contact on Twitter @ticktockmaths if you spot any errors that need correcting, and if you use and like the resource, leave me a review on TES. It really does make a difference to know if people are actually using these slides.

Surds and brackets

Download it here

Pretty simple stuff. But I’ve tried to add a bit of backwards/forwards thinking here.

I might even do rationalising next week. (I’m teaching this topic at the moment but I don’t always upload the slides I teach as they’re not 100% complete a lot of the time). That will mean the surds topic is DONE, though. And I like the idea of complete topics.

Simplifying Surds

Click here to download the resource

I created this for my class. There’s quite a lot here.

A starter, some example problem pairs, some activities etc. The usual.

The main activity is a total rip off of an activity I saw on Jo Morgan’s resourceaholic, though (although there’s a strong argument to be made that the activity there is better). I love how Jo points out the simple things. I am loving forwards-backwards worksheets at the moment. They force pupils to make decisions and get rid of that automatic thinking they can slip into where they are doing, but not thinking.

I also stole the ‘what is a surd’ intro from a Mr Barton session. It’s always important, I think, to be strict with your definitions. I had a bit of a nightmare today because I tried to teach significant figures, without defining what a significant figure was. A bit of thinking needed there…

You probably need to add a bit more practice to this lesson, but that’s where those websites that can generate a trillion random questions come in. I don’t just use these PowerPoints to teach, they are just a useful basis and structure.

Reverse Percentages

Download the resource here

Again, simple. There’s example problem pairs covering discounts/price increases and three exercises of questions.

Not much more to say.

Again, if you want to get in contact about collating these somewhere where people will actually see them, hit me up on Twitter. I’m @ticktockmaths.

Dividing Decimals

Download the resource here

The words I used in the TES description were ‘simple but comprehensive’. That’s what I’ve tried to aim for here. I’ve started with divisions that produce a decimal answer, which isn’t technically decimal division but I think is an important intro.

Again, there’s not much to this, but what is there made a nice lesson with some good discussion.