Resources, musings & lesson ideas for teaching, learning & enjoying maths.
I’ve written quite a few posts recently about using ratio tables extensively in my teaching for proportional reasoning. Following the explosion on Twitter about Edexcel’s non-calculator paper last Thursday, I thought it might be time for a critical evaluation on my part of just how useful (or not!) they are in tackling any or all of the …
Proportional reasoning on Edexcel June 2015 P1 Read More »
Reflections on a year of teaching the Mastery pathway (mastery mathematics) at Key Stage 3. Inspired by this evening’s #mathschat “How do you develop mastery from Year 7? What’s first for a new cohort”, and feeling slightly restricted by the 140 character limit in a tweet, I thought I’d take some time to write a …
Tonight’s post is another quick one about using ratio tables, this time for solving proportional reasoning problems. I’ve previously blogged about using them for percentage calculations and converting fractions to percentages, so thought that a post on general proportional reasoning was long overdue! Note: The ideas detailed in this post took a good few lessons to work through, and …
Exploring proportional reasoning Read More »
I chose this week’s LOTW because it worked really well as a complete lesson with minimal planning and preparation. I’m a big believer in varying what pupils do in lessons, and I love card sorts, discussion work and all that jazz, but sometimes (particularly on a windy Monday afternoon), that also needs to include more …
LOTW 17/05/15 – Introducing compound interest Read More »
Lots of brilliant stuff this fortnight! I’m adding all the fantastic lesson ideas and resources to the Resources by Topic index, but it’s a very slow process. I’m hoping to get all the pages done for September 2015. I particularly enjoyed this week’s #mathsTLP – I managed to miss the previous one as the bank holiday confused …
Pick of Twitter 09/05/15 and 16/05/15 Read More »
It seems that two years of shameless use of ratio tables have finally paid off; I saw three of my Year 11s independently tackle a non calculator percentages question like this today: I’m not sure exactly how I would have taught this before I discovered ratio tables; I suppose just pray that they noticed a …
Fraction and percentage equivalence using ratio tables Read More »
In the spirit of encouraging personal positive thinking, I’ve decided to start a new Sunday blog series on the best lesson I’ve taught the previous week. This week my pick actually covers two lessons of work, and was delivered to my Year 9s on Thursday and Friday. To provide a bit of context, we’re trialling …
LOTW 10/05/15 Comparing and ordering fractions and decimals Read More »
As I was away in London last weekend visiting a friend and completely not thinking about school, here’s a fortnight’s worth of Twitter picks! @Nat_Numeracy posted a great puzzle using Pythagoras’ theorem for those people who found Cheryl’s birthday too easy. @PardoeMary posted a link to Visual Patterns, a site with a huge amount of scope for use …
Pick of Twitter 02/05/15 Read More »
@missradders ~ Link to a blog post from Disappointed Idealist about the issues with SATs resits; a very thought-provoking piece from a parent/teacher. Given that a significant number of pupils get to secondary school in Year 7 with real confidence issues with maths, I can’t see that getting them to resit a standardised test is really going to …
Pick of Twitter 18/04/15 Read More »
I’ve been teaching trigonometry from scratch with Year 10 this week, so thought it would be a good opportunity to blog about the way I introduce sine, cosine and tangent. This is another sequence of lessons I love teaching, because it’s one of my tried and tested approaches and seems to work well each year. …
How I teach trigonometry in right-angled triangles Read More »