Resources, musings & lesson ideas for teaching, learning & enjoying maths.
Just a quick post to say I’ve just found an excellent site for quick starters and practice – Flash Maths is chock full of Flash applications for generating questions on loads of different topics. A five-minute poke-around unearthed these little gems: Equation Roulette: Generates linear equations up to old NC level 7. The buttons at the top …
Having taught this to nearly all of my KS3 groups at some point in the last few months, I think I’m becoming something of an expert. This year, we’ve started the Mastery Pathway at KS3, and nearly all of our students in Years 7, 8 and 9 (unsurprisingly) had gaps in their understanding of fractions. So I’ve …
Teaching improper fractions and mixed numbers Read More »
Last year, I attended the best CPD of my teaching career. It was a year-long course run by the NCETM; a project on multiplicative reasoning. Now don’t get me wrong, training days can be useful, but I can honestly say that this course changed how I teach fractions and proportion on a fundamental level. We …
This investigation is great for getting pupils to “spot” square number patterns – it’s particularly useful as a little starter a couple of weeks after completing the topic to remind them of the sequence of square numbers. Pupils could also make the patterns from multi-link cubes and then demonstrate how the top and bottom patterns …
Pupils explore which numbers can be written as the difference of two square numbers; a nice way to practise calculating with square numbers, but also encourages them to pattern-spot at the same time.
Square differences Read More »
This is one of my absolute favourite investigations to use when teaching square numbers. It can fit quite nicely into 15/20 minutes as a simple activity, or extend to a whole lesson with the class working together. To find out if a number is happy: Pick any two-digit number (e.g. 23). Square and add the …