Things I Think I Think…3

I aplogise to the Hull City blog Amber Nectar, who I kind of nicked this post format off.

  1. I’m really into ‘fill in the gaps’ activities recently. I love how they develop thinking forward and backwards. I love this worksheet on time calculations which I used recently. I went down really well and sparked great conversations. Love this kinda stuff. (Although for some reason TES won’t let me review the resource and give it 5 stars).
  2. Talking of TES, I’ve updated my resources on Measuring Bearings, Calculating Bearings, Expanding Brackets and the Sine Rule and uploaded them on there. I’ve corrected mistakes, sorted out some formatting and freshened things up.
    I’m still unsure about all this. I don’t think my resources should be on their own website. I understand that we have far too many resource websites to check, but at the same time TES is pretty rubbish. It’s annoying to update a resource if I see an error and track changes, and it’s interface and search isn’t great.
    Plus there’s all this paid junk flooding the listings meaning that stuff never gets seen. The other thing is that I struggle to get feedback there. I don’t know if stuff is not getting downloaded because it’s rubbish or because people don’t see it.
    I’d love to have a platform with some quality control that I could submit resources to, but I realise that’s probably a pipedream considering how much such a thing would cost to run.
    Tweet at me if you want to discuss any of this because I think there’s potential in connecting things.
    I know it’s kinda pathetically attention seeking but I’ve been making resources for 10 years now and I feel a lot of it just gets lost in the mix. Which kinda puts me off doing it.
  3. Talking about bearings… I did my measuring Bearings lessons the other day, and we’d lost a load of half protractors. So I used this template and printed them out on tracing paper. A game changer! It worked brilliantly. Just make sure you change the printer output setting to ‘transparent’ or whatever similar setting you are offered.
  4. I’ve been thinking a lot about books recently. I’ve got some colleagues who are really on it with books and end up with classes that have awesome books. It’s something that I really want to work on next year (I’m sure I’ve said this before). I think it requires quite a lot of follow through and effort, though. Definitely something to think about.
  5. I love this Tweet. Lots to think about in regards to the language that we use.

New Resource : Solving Two Step Equations

Download the PowerPoint and worksheet here.

I have, again, tried to avoid inspection by using slightly annoying numbers. I would suggest that calculators are a must for this resource.

I also added the following page, which I really like.

Hopefully questions 9 and 10 provoke a good discussion. I love a bit of direct instruction, but I also love a bit of debate and discussion. I think there’s a little misconception that direct instruction is just dull lecturing. As with anything, it’s about the mix and variety.

I’m still thinking of a good way to share these. In the summer term, when I have more free time, I’m going to a proper evaluation of what I have that is good enough to show people, and how I can present stuff so that it’s useful and findable. There isn’t any current reason for this stuff to all be consigned to this site, I think it would be better to bring disparate resources together.

Things I Think I Think … 2

  1. I love it when a student goes away and voluntarily does extra work because the task is so fun. This week I did a bit of Artful Maths’ Impossible Objects. Wonderful lesson and I got some great results. More than that, I got some really, really enthused students.
  2. I’ve been using my iPad a lot recently. I really like it, but it’s made me think about my board work. I have a few colleagues who make beautiful board notes using colour and shape. I’ve never got there and I really would like to. I really would love to invest my time in this in the future. See the Tweet from Ed Southall at the bottom of this post. It’s gorgeous.
  3. We’ve been using Times Tables Rockstars a bit for our younger learners and it’s really nice. But it also made me think that the issue is not our lack of resources, but the abundance of them. It’s rather like Netflix. All of this content and I spend ages scrolling the menu deciding what I want to watch. It’s why I think Resourceaholic is so good. It’s just good stuff, well curated.
    I was saddened to see Jo is having a tough time at the moment. If you haven’t already, you should buy her book, It’s fascinating and a really good exploration of different methods. I think it’s really worth knowing these, and there’s great discussions to be had with classes as to which methods are better and why. She also has a buy me coffee page.
  4. I was talking to my tutor group about social media the other day. We were talking about the Pavlov’s Dog ping of pleasure if you get a like or something. I’m real susceptible to this. I posted my perimeter lesson, and it got a ton of likes, but my last One Step Equation lessons got not likes or retweets. Got no idea why.
  5. I couldn’t think of 5 things, but I wanted to get into the habit of blogging more regularly.

Solving One Step Equations

Download the PowerPoint | Download the worksheet

Another attempt to take lessons that were a bit rubbish and update them, with a focus on good questions.

I’ve taken what I think is quite a brave choice to use decimals extensively throughout. There is a reason for that, and that is thinking about the skill that I want students to understand. The skill here is rearranging to solve. Using ‘nice’ numbers can lead students to solving by inspection. Great! They get the answer, but they often are not using the very skill I’m trying to teach.

Hopefully by using more ‘difficult’ numbers (with the aid of a calculator), students will do the thing that I want them to do.

Maybe not.

I tried to cover every possible type of question, but if I’ve missed one, let me know. I haven’t bothered with worded questions at all. I think maybe that’s a separate thing altogether, but it could go here.

I think I haven’t spent enough time doing this before and I’ve tired to be really in depth. As always, feedback is welcome.

Perimeter

Download the PowerPoint here | Download the worksheet here (not technically needed, just the PPT questions in a printer friendly format) | Download the plotting and measuring worksheet.

One of the best MathsConf sessions I’ve been to, and one that I come back to again and again is Jo Morgan’s Indices in Depth (Watch a recorded version here). It really stuck with me because of something she said.

I’m paraphrasing, but Jo said that she used to cover all of the index laws in one lesson, but she now realises how that wasn’t good.

When I watched that presentation, I was also covering index laws in one lesson. By doing that we rob ourselves of the opportunity to develop mathematical thinking. We rob ourselves of doing interesting questions or delving into specifics and really covering things in the detail and sophistication that we should.

Anyway, I normally cover perimeter in one lesson. Add up the sides!

But it in trying to make some better slides I realised how much you can do with it. Change of units! Being explicit about what the different marks on the lines mean?

Mysterious marks

So this is an attempt to address all of that.

There’s example problem pairs and exercises for:

  • Regular perimeter, including the notation
  • Finding a side, given the perimeter
  • Finding missing sides and compound shapes
  • Measuring the perimeter (by plotting coordinates and using a ruler to measure the perimeter)
  • Using different units
  • Some algebraic stuff.
I stole this idea from Heylings.

also a lovely discussion picture

You could probably easily do 3 lessons on this. Using perimeter to build mathematical thinking, rather than just teaching the content. The content is a conduit.

One of the best ways to do this is I’ve seen is Mr Draper’s lessons here. I’d highly recommend you checking that out. Especially these questions, which I think are gorgeous.

Absolutely gorgeous.

So that’s a good 5 lessons you could probably do with perimeter, not including the old area/perimeter investigation when you try and keep one constant and change the other.

One lesson I’d been using. Think of all the lost opportunity.

Completing the square

Download the resource here

Sometimes you look back at your old work and feel it was written by another person. I went to teach completing the square this week and I couldn’t understand my own resource. It was all over the place. I’d clearly thought about activity first and the learning journey second. It was all messed up. I introduced ax^2 + bx + c waaaay to quickly.

Well now it’s a lot better (in my opinion).

There’s an example problem pair with a simple example and two exercises on doing the simple stuff before we go anywhere near anything harder.

THEN we move on to doing harder ones, and finally turning points.

There’s also a matching worksheet with all the questions on.

I’ve deleted the old resource.

-Rich

Writing in standard form

Get the PowerPoint here

Please tell me if you can’t download from the above link. Hopefully you can also see a preview of the PowerPoint above. (Clicking the ‘book’ icon should open a menu that will allow you to download a copy for yourself)

Been meaning to update this one for a while. The old ones were not good.

Firstly, I’ve gone for FRESH NEW LOOK

I am trying to do some more etymology stuff this year, so I’ve got a dedicated bit talking about it. Mainly, I’ve got rid of the big picture and the learning objective (which was usually just the title anyway). I’ve also tried to minimise my use of dark bits as you’ll see.

These animate in. I think it’s really interesting to be specific. Talk about what is and isn’t standard form. In my early teaching career I definitely rushed through stuff and it makes me cringe a bit.

Obviously before you do this, you need to tell them what standard form is!

Then we do an example problem pair and then this

I love moving between different forms and having to think backwards. Blocking out the tables is always good. I also like getting students to write out the full expanded form.

I do the same for negative indices and then I added this


I think it’s important that we don’t lose the point of standard form, which is easy comparison of numbers and scale. All that stuff like Scale of the Universe (https://htwins.net/scale2/) which makes this topic cool!

Please hit me up on Twitter if you have feedback or comments!

Things I Think I Think … 1

I know I haven’t blogged for ages. Sometimes it’s a bit daunting doing a proper post with loads of resources etc. So I’m just going to jot some thoughts down.

  • 1. Craftsmanship Videos

I’m a bit obsessed with videos like this at the moment.

There’s so much wonderful about them, but I’ve come to have a realisation about doing things in a very deliberate way.

The woman takes care and attention over every part of her process. Nothing is done in a thoughtless way. She is not doing things automatically. It’s kinda how I aim for myself to behave as a teacher (not saying I always hit that height) and how I want my students to behave. Taking care. Thinking. Not just doing an automatic process.

I’ve noticed that sometimes pupils are particularly prone to slipping into automatic mode in a test. This year I’ve really tried to point out and develop self-talk but there’s so much more I need to look at there …

  • 2. Old Resource Issues

Talking of a lack of care, I’ve been looking at some of my resources that are a bit old.. and I’m quite embarrassed. I really need to do a full audit of the site to remove the junk (more on that idea later) . Let’s talk about a particularly egregious one. This is my Solving Equations (with brackets) PowerPoint. It’s terrible.

First, let’s look at this example-problem pair


There’s so many things wrong with it. Both questions can be divided nicely by the factor outside the bracket. What happens when this isn’t the case? Clearly not a huge amount of thought has been put into these examples

And then you have the problem set

I have spent 100x more time trying to design some sort of fun thing here than on the actual questions. They’re terrible. And the ‘fun’ thing isn’t fun. It’s just fluff. No one wants to do these questions more because of the rubbish around them.

The engagement comes from the thinking about the questions and their differences/similarities and ‘ahh’ moments to point out. This question set has NONE of that. Sometimes I look through my previous work and am very embarrassed. I know how long I spent looking for images I thought were cool when I should have been writing better questions!

  • 3. Mr Barton’s New Book

Talking of better questions, I’ve been reading Reflect, Expect, Check, Explain by Craig Barton. It is, again, amazing.

I absolutely don’t mean this as an insult (hang in there, Craig, if you’re reading), but it’s full of obvious stuff. As in, you read it and think ‘Oh that’s really obvious. Why have I not being doing that?!?!’. It’s really made me reflect on my practise and how to improve what I do. I think a lot of what Craig talks about comes back to that Japanese craftswoman video. Doing things deliberately. Thinking deeply about what you do. Caring about the details. Craig is the king of this and I’m so glad he wrote this book.

  • 4. I am making new resources…sorta

I’ve been trying to freshen up my resources. Give them a bit of a nicer look and also rewriting a lot of the questions. That process has been rather slow. I’ve done a few. You can see an updated version of my adding fractions resource here. I’m also trying to add a bit of etymology to my lessons. It’s actually been rather successful, especially thinking about links between words. And it’s interesting.

On the other hand, I’m not writing a lot of resources. I was all ready to write some circle theorems slides and then I saw the ones on mathspad which are fantastic. Lovely interactive and really clear worksheets and handouts. Why make something that would be worse?

I’m also a bit

  • 5. Fed Up With PowerPoint

OK, so that’s not true. I still think having a PowerPoint is a way I like to plan. It’s easy to plan the narrative of what you want to do with slides. But I’m definitely removing my reliance on it. I grew up with technology and fall back far too often, even when it makes me inflexible.

For instance, I had been giving my year 8’s a Corbett Maths 5 A Day starter (which I am not having a go at and I think are ace). However it wasn’t quite working for my class. So I decided to write my questions. On the board. With a pen. Again. OBVIOUS. But I did teacher training in the age where this was a bit of a no no (downtime and all). It’s been GREAT. I’ve just been picking 5 questions of stuff from the things we’ve done this year, just written up on the board as they come in. I can be really flexible with the questions. If they struggled with something one day, I can make sure to include it the next. If they’re finding something easy I can leave it for a few lessons. I can be adaptable!

I’ve been teaching 10 years and it’s taken me all that time to realise that you don’t need to plan half a term of starters at a time. That not everything needs to be projected.

via GIPHY

What I’m doing during distance learning

Hello.

I know this is the first post in a while, but I thought I’d talk about my routines and what I’m doing during this outbreak. Maybe it will help you solidify your thoughts.

I’m going to talk about this through the prism of my year 7s.

I teach them 7 times every two weeks. So I’m advantaged by time.

I’ generally sticking to the scheme of work. For instance last week and this week have been ratio lessons, so we’ve done some work on that.

Most lessons started with a video that looks like this

A simple example-problem pair there, filmed using a visualiser. I have found the videos have worked really well for a few reasons

  • They’re personal. I say hello to the students and the example-problem pairs are perfectly suited to the task that follows (because I’ve created them both. They’re just print outs of the slides I make available on this website)
  • Everyone can watch a video. They give the students a no-excuses thing that they should have written in their book at the start of the lesson

I’ve then been following with a worksheet. These have usually been also taken from my slides (which also contain answers). I’ve found it best to make things as simple as possible. At first I was setting two tasks, now I set one. If it doesn’t take the full lesson time, so be it. This means that we’re going to have less coverage than we would have done if we’d have remained open, but I think you have to accept that things are not going to be perfect. I’d rather the basics be covered well then rushing through things.

I’ve found feedback slightly difficult. They’re uploading their work as pictures on Google Drive, but sorting through it all and marking isn’t ideal. I’m currently highlighting it and writing a little comment. I wish Google Drive had stamps! Maybe I’ll move to whole-school feedback.

I’ve tried to avoid setting too much Dr Frost (as much as I love it!) although I have used the ‘topic tests’ as check out tests to gauge their understanding.

I’ve also been trying to set work that gets them away from the computer once a week. Here’s an example.

Image

Now this task may be a bit simple, but I think it’s worth doing because it

  • Get’s them off their computer
  • Is investigatoary.

Now, tasks like these are hard to write, but I got some nice feedback from students.

Image

And it allowed me to pick up on their usage of language

Image
Image

I think it’s worthwhile setting these tasks. I’m going to set another ‘look around the house and collect stuff’ task.

This is a trying time for everyone, but it’s also a time to learn and to reflect. It’s important that we approach the time with patience and a willingness to learn.

Hope you all stay safe out there

Richard

x

Trigonometry

Download the PowerPoint here.

This is basically a lot of ideas knicked from Resourceaholic. Sorry @mathsjem! Quite happy with this, though. I have used this with my year 9 class this year and I think I’ve taught trig better than I ever have before.

Starts with sine. Talking about similar triangles.

Not using the calculator yet. I want them to appreciate that these are ratios, not just buttons on a calculator!

Then it moves onto two example problem pairs. I introduced the button on the calculator at this point.

Then some questions.

I went through the same process for cosine. I really spent a lot of time talking about just sine and just cosine this year. I think it really helped understanding.

Then, picking between (Don’t worry. The highlights animate in).

Then I introduced tan in the same way.

Some more practice on just tan, very much like the sin practice.

Then a mix of everything.

That was 2.5 lessons. And we didn’t even talk about finding the angle.

Trying to take the time and teach it right first time.

I think there’s possibly more to add here. I think I could have written something about answers or questions when you’re given a ratio like cosx.

Obviously there’s no problem solving AT ALL here.

There’s no mention of SOHCAHTOA. Good.

I think I’m going to write a separate trigonometry problems PowerPoint.