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.
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.
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.
There isn’t much here. I was just trying to explicitly teach something I often leave in passing. (ie that surd addition works like collecting any other like term).
Not a full lesson. Just maybe an activity to throw in.
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.
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.