Resources, musings & lesson ideas for teaching, learning & enjoying maths.
I love using Tarsia puzzles – they’re great for getting the pupils talking about their maths. If you’re not sure what I’m on about, start off by popping over to Hermitech Labs to get a copy of the Formulator Tarsia software, then have a look at the premade ones that Craig Barton has collected on his site. Here …
Top ten tips for Tarsia Read More »
I started writing about multiplication methods yesterday (read Part 1 here), but waffled for rather longer than necessary, and as a result, didn’t actually get to discuss what I originally wanted to, namely which from grid, lattice (Gelosia, Chinese, Napier’s etc) or long multiplication we should be teaching as a method to pupils. In one …
Multiplication madness? (2) Read More »
As a department, we seem to have spent the last six months debating exactly which method is OK for multiplying large numbers. Personally, I learnt column/long multiplication at school, and got pretty good at it, although to be honest, past about midway through Year 11 I can’t recall a situation where I’ve really had to …
Multiplication madness? (1) Read More »
I absolutely love teaching Pythagoras’ theorem – not sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with the sense of “wow” I got when I first learned about it and realised that maths isn’t all about doing sums. There’s loads of really interesting stuff you can do with it, and as the first …
Teaching Pythagoras’ theorem Read More »
It arrived! Having ordered a copy of Alex Bellos’s second book, Alex Through the Looking Glass right after discovering it existed a few days ago, the gods at Amazon finally decided to deposit it on my doormat this afternoon. I nearly crushed it when I opened the door… So after hacking into it with an over-large knife …
Through the looking glass Read More »
Thank you, Internet, for wasting my evening. I don’t know how I found this on YouTube – one of my random click-a-thons searching for goodies, and I’m a sucker for “magic maths” tricks. This one is how to square any (two-digit) number mentally. If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the basic idea …
The first session I attended at Celebration of Maths 2015 was titled “Effective Revision” and run by Ryan O’Grady (@tiredoldcliche). My colleague had picked the sessions for us, and I wasn’t sure I’d get much out of this – I was pretty convinced that I’d got revision sorted. So far this year with Year 11 …
Effective revision (COM2015) Read More »
I have to admit, I was flagging by this point in the afternoon. A combination of an earlier-than-usual start on a Saturday and an inevitable caffeine crash and accompanying headache at about half three meant I was actually (shamefully) considering disappearing early – but I am SO glad I stuck around for Marcus du Sautoy’s …
The Lottery, lemmings and primes Read More »
I’ve been using bar modelling quite extensively in my teaching since being involved with the NCETM’s multiplicative reasoning project last year. Part of the project was to emphasise the importance of diagrammatic representations of problems in teaching maths for understanding; we were given materials to deliver to Key Stage 3 classes, some of which included …
Bar modelling – reflections on Celebration of Maths 2015 Read More »
Excuse the pun, I’m just quite excited about the Celebration of Maths event tomorrow. Due to the fact that I’m going to the bar modelling session tomorrow (and that I’m a geek who loves doing Maths on a Friday night), I decided to go on a bar modelling hunt using the Foundation paper 1 from the Edexcel GCSE 9-1 Sample Assessment materials.
We’re going on a bar hunt Read More »