Category: From Around The Web
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Paper
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.
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Constructions game
I hate teaching constructions. It’s so fiddly. Here’s a little game to make it a little nicer.
A little exploration of trying to make shapes using only lines and circles. It’s fun.
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The Progression Of Addition and Subtraction
I don’t know about you, but as a secondary school teacher I’ve not often thought about teaching some of the maths fundamentals. We assume students can already add, subtract, multiply and divide single digit numbers. Secondary teachers don’t pay enough credit to primary teachers, who have the critical job of embedding concepts like place value.
But sometimes students come in without these skills, and I’ve always found breaking them down really difficult.
This video is lovely It’s one of a series, talking about the progression of skills from first principles. I highly recommend all maths teachers watch them. I will certainly be trialling some of these ideas. I found the talk of five and tens grids particularly interesting.
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DUDAMATH
I have found this. Makes patterns. Shows equations. Solves equations in an interactive way. Has some statistics stuff. Can’t believe I’ve never seen this before.
Setting up an equation and then showing how to rearrange it visually is powerful. Watch the hint videos under the ‘?’ on the right hand side of the page to get up to speed.
Good pun, too.
Play with it and get back to me.
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Design makes a difference
If you visit this website often (which, based on my stats, you almost definitely don’t) you might see that I switch the design around occasionally. I’m constantly fiddling with design and font use, trying to chase that holy grail : something that’s nicely designed. I’m the same for my worksheets and presentations. I’m constantly trying to make things in formats that look nice. I don’t think I’ve achieved it yet. I also think it’s really important. There’s something elegant to good design. An uncluttered clarity. A beautiful zen.
Whilst I haven’t managed it, there’s a lot of people producing lovely stuff (often in very different ways), and I wanted to highlight a few of them, talk about what makes their work nice.
The first person I want to talk about is TES user Dooranran. His stuff is lovely. He uses a lot of themes (particularly superheroes and football) . I’m wary of using a theme. Often I find as many pupils put off by the theme as are engaged by it, but every Dooranran activity I’ve used has been very successful. Especially this Euro 2016 maths activity. I’d say the reason behind this maybe to do with the efforts that Dooranran puts into combining his themes and his mathematical content. They often gel in a really nice way. The maths content of his work is often very challenging, too.
The other person I want to talk about is Don Steward. Again! I’m always talking about Don Steward. So I should. He’s ace! He’s also odd. He’s a fan of unicase, which means that all of work is lowercase. I’m sure this violates some schools’ literacy policy, but it does look nice. I’ve never noticed how capital letters are rubbish before. He’s also a big fan of white space. Have a look at the sheet below.
It’s clean, it’s neat, it’s tidy. I think it can be tempting to cram too much on a sheet and overwhelm students. The other thing you notice about Don’s work is that he uses minimal instructions. I think this is a very underrated and important point of problem solving. Figuring out the problem is part of the problem. Look at this.
I like this. The white space, the presentation. This isn’t a problem to be done quickly and moved on from. It’s a problem to be savoured and worked on.
I really need to work on my presentation. If you want to get involved in chat, what programs do you use? Are we too stuck to PowerPoint and Word when better tools could do a better job? I vaguely want to try InDesign but I feel it’s like taking a hammer to the problem. Am I being too picky? Is bad design perfectly OK. I’ve seen some horrendously designed presentations on TES with great reviews. I content ultimately king?
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Number facts
You type in a number and it presents you with loads of facts about that number, breaking it down into it’s prime factors and some scales. It’s lovely. Try it yourself. Here’s the page for 2048.
Quick starter idea (after showing students this website):
56
Give me some facts about this number.
You could use this often, changing the number every time.
Quick investigation idea: What is the best number? Explain why. Give reasons.
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A little tip
Someone showed me this lately. It made me think about how much a tiny little twist can make a task massively more engaging.
Task One
5x + 3 = 13
7x + 11 = 25
4x + 8 = 32Find x.
Task Two
5x + 3 = 13
7x + 11 = 25
4x + 8 = 32In which equations does x=2?
Task one is boring. I want to do task two.
This thinking has come from Don Steward. My last blog was about his work, and it’s wonderful to dive into. There’s loads of stuff with simple twists like this and the way the work is presented is outstanding (There’s a lot to be said for this). Every maths teacher should check out Don’s blog.
