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.
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.
