I’m going to admit something: I often don’t enjoy teaching constructions. It’s fiddly. No matter how much you demonstrate whole-class, there’s no substitute for sitting with someone and showing them how to hold and move the compass.
One solution is experts. Getting competent students to pair up and help less competent ones.
Another solution is to use A3 paper.
Pupils are often unwilling to make mistakes in their books. OFSTED have been picking up on messy work, and there’s been a lot of focus of students showing that they are proud of their work, and presenting it as an exemplar document. I’m not so sure I’m a fan of this. Often working can be scrappy. There’s an argument to be made that this working can be done somewhere else and thrown away, leaving us with a beautifully presented bit of work. But this denies the reality that sometimes maths work isn’t a lovely linear process. I don’t know how I feel about the entire thing.
Anyway…Using A3 paper like this makes students way more confident in failing and trying again. It also allows them to ‘doodle’ (practice using a compass which is useful).
It can lead to much nicer results than trying to do anything in their books.
