Proportion in Context

Get the PowerPoint here

As promised, here is a proportion in context lesson.

Starts with just naming the type of proportion. I love the ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ example I came up with.

I tend to teach direct, then indirect, then finish with these in context problems.

I encourage solving both through algebraic methods and using something like MathsBot’s Ratio Boxes, which a really awesome. I used these as starters a few times.

Most of ratio is now ‘complete’ as a module. If you click the menu up top, you’ll see that there’s a reasonably comprehensive set of resources, which I’ve reviewed and updated.

As always, feedback and questions to my twitter @ticktockmaths.

And if you’ve got a topic request, send it my way. I’m using my gained time to update and make as many resources as possible.

Inverse Proportion

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Very similar to my last lesson, but looking at indirect.

This all ties together with a proportion problems PowerPoint which I will upload before the end of the week, where you have to pick if you’re using direct or indirect.

I’ve also updated the ratio lessons I’ve done and added them to the menu above.

Direct Proportion (and being a Gem)

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A really simple PowerPoint covering direct proportion. I’ve deliberately left context out of it here and focused on questions that ask you to use the formula. There’s some example problem pairs and some exercises. Gotta say, I love a good fill in the blanks question. Makes you think forwards and back.

I’ve included examples here with a negative proportionality constant. Twitter was pretty unanimous that this was OK.

If you disagree, tweet at me!

In other news : I got mentioned in Jo Morgan’s end of year ‘gem’ awards. What an honour!

I won the ‘Hidden Gem’ award. As always, there’s an open offer here. If you want to host any of this stuff, or help it reach a bigger audience (or have feedback as to why it doesn’t), please contact me.

Next time : Indirect proportion.

Factorising Non-monic Quadratics

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Trying to get back into the swing of things.

I use grid method to do this. I’m a big proponent of grid. Reading through Jo Morgan’s amazing Compendium of Mathematical methods, there’s loads of approaches. But I like to use grid for everything.

I’ve also updated my expanding double brackets and using the quadratic formula PowerPoints. They’re now simpler, have different questions and just feel a lot more airy and bright.

As always, tweet me @ticktockmaths for any feedback or questions. I love a good tweet.

Estimating the mean from a grouped frequency table

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Starts with a little task on finding the midpoint. I often find this trips students up more than you would think.

Moves onto some example problem pairs and then a very (overly?) structured worksheet.

I don’t know how I feel about this level of scaffold. At least it reduces.

Then some questions that I wrote that I really like.

And then… that’s it. This filled the lesson nicely and I really didn’t feel like I needed much else.

Maybe I could have done a section where the mean is given but there is a hidden frequency, but I didn’t want to be overly prescriptive.

Rearranging equations / Changing the subject

Download : Rearranging equations [No factorisation]

Download : Rearranging equations [With factorisation]

I never know what to call this topic.

I’ve broken it down into two PowerPoints and I have run it for my year 9s over 3/4 lessons. The first PowerPoint is the better one.

There’s a focus on what it means for something to BE the subject. When I used these slides this week, these questions generated the best discussion and revealed some misconceptions I didn’t really think would be there. A significant number of the class thought 2a was fine as the subject of an equation.

Not to blow my own trumpet. but I think the questions where students have to identify if the first step was good or not was also a great conversation driver. I love this idea of just looking at the first step.

The second PowerPoint is much more boring. It’s a few example problem pairs and a few questions looking at more difficult rearrangements, where you need to factorise.

I’m sure you could jazz this up a little bit, but I really think this is challenging enough for students, and needs to be given detailed, close attention.

As always, review these on TES if you liked them or used them. Follow me on Twitter etc. All that stuff does make a difference, as sad as that is.

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

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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.

Addition of surds

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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.