Completely revamped lesson. Includes an example problem pair, lots of mini-whiteboard work, a regular activity (which is still kind of rubbish to be honest. I could do with thinking about these questions more) and a nice little codebreaker.
I prefer setting my code breakers out like this. I find if you do ‘collect a joke’ kids will just try and guess the joke. The answer here (au4a83 ) is how you type ‘password’ on a Taiwanese keyboard. From this very interesting article (not really maths related).
I’ve been reading Peter Mattock’s book Visible Maths. I’m only two chapters in but I’m really enjoying it. Visual representations is something I haven’t really learnt much about. I’ve dabbled in bar modelling, but I’m a stranger to things like Cuisenaire rods. So much so that I had to read up on how to spell them.
I particularly like this
I often do regrouping and addition as one lesson and maybe I need to be more explicit introducing regrouping as a skill in itself.
So I came up with this, using mathsbot.com to generate the images. It didn’t take very long.
This took me about two weeks to complete! Don’t know why, it’s not that many slides. I drew lots of Geogebra diagrams. There’s a worksheet with 15 questions.
I made this for a class with really strong prior attainment. I think I could probably do with some questions where they have to pick the correct calculation. I have added 4 questions that can be done on whiteboards to kick off the lesson, though.
There’s also a chat on when to use the sine rule.
Obviously this animates so it doesn’t just display the answers!
And some more fun questions!
There’s a second lesson here, too. Using the sine rule. (although I could really do with some more questions here!)
Bearings is one of those difficult topics to teach, I think. Even though it’s reasonable easy.
I’ve done a lesson here concentrating on just measuring and constructing. No calculation at all. I’m going to put that in a separate lesson.
Which means you’re going to have to print out the example problem pair 🙁
Starts with a little discussion on if something could be a bearing or not.
Goes onto a worksheet on measuring.
I suppose I should have really presented an example with angles labeled and asked them to pick out the right bearing (like the exam question at the end of this PowerPoint) but I think I wanted to add that in next lesson.
Then some whiteboard work on the compass.
Then some construction questions.
My example problem pair here includes animations. I kind of hate it. I’ve really tried to move on from ‘clicking’. If you’ve downloaded my PowerPoint in the past you might have noticed that I’ve deleted a lot of stuff. I used to have animated multi-step solutions and examples. Indeed some of my older, non-updated PowerPoints still have that stuff. I really regret that now. I know it’s a crutch, and can be helpful in ‘scripting’ but I think kids need to see you WRITING and doing the calculation yourself (I use the pen tool in PowerPoint).
But there wasn’t a real way to get around using animations here, unless you have a visualizer. If you do, do that!
I’m not quite sure what I was thinking when I wrote these slides initially. They were a mess!
For a start, I bundled writing inequalities, number lines and solving all onto one PowerPoint! That’s waaaaaaay too much. It’s also a little ‘disrespectful’ to the topic of inequality notation. That skill is easily worth a lesson on it’s own! I clearly hadn’t sat down and thought clearly enough about the subtleties of the topic.
You can do loads of good spaced learning with inequalities. We can practice ideas of place value.
Hello!
I’ve cleaned this slide up. Before it looked like this :
EEEEEEEK! This is NOT good slide design. Sir! Is number one 1.9 [] 5 ?
I’ve also added lots of whiteboard questions and a little bit of testing if an inequality is true. After all, inequalities are all about systems and logic tests, really.
I’ve also redrawn all my images of inequality number lines in GeoGebra because they looked gross before.
This is a really small lesson on Polygons. I taught it as a half lesson. Includes a definition of a polygon variation theory thing.
Plus my first ever Quizlet! I liked doing this. I played it as a live game. You can see it in this little video.
Pupils are presented with a term and a definition across several screens, so they have to work together. I really enjoyed doing this.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘I should do Quizlet all the time!’. I think it’s only really good for learning definitions, but it’s definitely a good tool in the arsenal.
I know, it’s strange that I’ve left this one until last. I did the silly thing of assuming that since I taught a high ability year 7 group, that they’d be ace at this, but they weren’t, which I caught during a quiz during a plenary.
I’d made the classic mistake of assuming prior knowledge.
As an addendum, I hate stuff like ‘the chance of it being Sunday tomorrow’ because I feel like that’s not really a probability statement.
Has a task that worked really well with my class. Write the missing step. Cognitive load and that.
Plus some questions.
Goes onto more complicated examples and exercises.
As an aside, I posted a picture from this resource on Twitter and it got (at the time of reading) close to 200 likes and I ended up picking up about 50 new followers.
Did this activity on Friday. Worked really well. Must try more 'missing step' stuff. pic.twitter.com/6CL6C0m8vY
Obviously includes the ‘horse race’ game. I did it a bit differently this year. I gave out dice to everyone and a sheet to everyone. I then collated all the results so we could see exactly how many had 7 as their ‘winner’. It worked really well. Especially with a bit of ‘acting’ to sell the idea that the result was interesting and surprising.
Wrote some questions including some moving between relative frequency and frequency.
Discussion. Also a task I’m not sure if I like.
I’ve included this at the end. I have run this task a few times and been dissatisfied every time.
In my head, I imagine students trying to make the die loaded by weighting it, rolling it lots of times to test the relative frequency to see if they have got close, then refining the weight inside their cube. There’s a few reasons I think it’s never gone as well as I would have wished.
It’s quite fiddly to make the net, put a weight in it, fold it up, take out the weight and fold it up again.
It’s harder than it looks!
What MATHEMATICALLY are students thinking about when they’re doing this task? Are they just adjusting weights. I don’t really know if the focus of the task is the MATHEMATICS.
I’ve left it in here (at the end), though, because it’s the first task I ever thought up (in my PGCSE year) and one day I want to run it and make it work.
One day.
PS: These are a game changer in terms of noise! Every school should have a set.
