I only did ‘one side’ here. I figured it would be better to leave the two sides until later.
Contains a lot of discussion slides.
And some ‘correct the work’ slides. I don’t normally do ‘correct the work’ because I’ve had limited success with it in the past, but I’ve always asked students to work out which are wrong, rather than telling them that work is definately wrong and asking them to find the mistake. When I did this, the task went much better than it has before.
Download the PowerPoint/Worksheet here
I’ve massively overhauled my previous bounds PowerPoint, which I think was pretty poor and needed updating.
Loads of stuff here.
One of things I did was screenshot some of this and put it into mathigon’s Polypad, and use that website’s number lines to really try and dig into the understanding.
There’s no using bounds here. That’s a whole other massive project.
Download the PowerPoint and Worksheet here
Just a quick one this week.
I’ve been reading Michael Pershan’s Teaching Maths With Examples this week. It’s really good. I recommend it. Quick, simple and easily digestible. Great stuff.
In the book, Michael describes using Venn Diagrams to give an overview of what, exactly, we mean when we talk about systems of equations. This really made me sit up, because I think students often don’t quite know what systems of equations ARE. They can procedurally solve them, but sometimes struggle to get a big picture of what they’re doing.
This resource aims to give the big picture, the WHY, before moving onto the HOW to solve.
So we do this by trial and error, then you swoop in and show students a more formal, better method for finding these answers.
I hope you like it and find it useful.
As always, feedback to @ticktockmaths on Twitter.
We’re back learning from home this week, and it’s given me a bit of impetus to clean up some old resources and make some new ones. Everything here is quite short and simple, but hopefully it saves someone a bit of time.
Decimal Time
Download the PowerPoint and worksheet here.
I found when I was doing compound measures that my students needed extra practice on this. It was holding them back from answering speed questions correctly. So here is a quick lesson on converting time.
I delivered this digitally, sharing my screen over Google Classroom and using my iPad pencil to write my modelling over the example problem pairs. I added the PDF of the questions into the Google Classroom and gave them ten minutes to complete the questions either in their books or digitally on the PDF.
We then came back after these ten minutes to go through the answers. I then made sure they could not leave the lesson until they had handed in their work on Google Classroom. This a routine I go through pretty regularly and I find it works really well. It means I get a log of what they’ve done and there’s accountability as their work is checked then and there.
Percentage Increase and Decrease [Non Calc]
Download the PowerPoint and the worksheet here.
Really simple lesson. Really simple questions. However, I also added a little slide of 9 multiple choice questions. I like this format. It did require over 150 animations, though!
It was really nice to show this and go through the questions one-by-one discussing why I had chosen the wrong answers. I am not 100% happy with the question set, though. If you’ve got any good suggestions for questions, please tweet me @ticktockmaths.
Starter : Two or a half
A really simple starter. I made this because I did a Kahoot online with my year 10s and a large proportion of them got question 11 wrong. They knew how to do speed, but they instinctively didn’t really want to get a half as an answer. I made this as a starter for the following lesson to really hammer home the point.
Quite a productive week. It’s easy to make stuff when you don’t put yourself under pressure to make 1000 slide behemoths, but just simple, quick and easy resources that don’t reinvent the wheel.
I did the Sine Rule ages ago but never got around to doing cosine rule stuff. I think because the Mathspad activities are so good!
I didn’t go much into labelling the sides (which maybe I need to in future) or putting it all together. I think I’m going to do a resource called ‘Trigonometry : Putting it all together’ where several rules are used. Maybe with some exam questions and a bit of goal free stuff.
No posts for the next two weeks. I’m off on holiday.
I aplogise to the Hull City blog Amber Nectar, who I kind of nicked this post format off.
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.
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.
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?
So this is an attempt to address all of that.
There’s example problem pairs and exercises for:
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.
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.