Following on from last week’s MathsTLP, I dug out this task on differentiation from first principles – I designed this ages ago for an A Level taster session, but it works equally well to introduce differentiation when it comes up in the A Level syllabus. So we begin by looking at the gradient of a …
Differentiation from first principles Read More »
Picking apart and reworking my lessons from last year, I noticed that I almost exclusively model worked examples by handwriting “live” rather than pre-typing. I don’t recall making a conscious decision to do this, but following a discussion with my husband this weekend about print vs digital media, I thought I’d think more critically whether …
Effective examples in the digital age Read More »
I’ve been super-lucky this year to get a top-set Year 10 group on my timetable – I’m feeling dead happy about this because: I taught them in Year 7, and they’re a great group – very enthusiastic about maths, a bright bunch and some fantastic personalities; I haven’t ever taught a top set at GCSE (because I …
LOTW – Making graphical and algebraic links with simultaneous equations 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 »
1. Crack place value firstThis might seem like a no-brainer, but teaching rounding on top of an insecure understanding of place value is a recipe for disaster. Before pupils can get their heads around rounding, particularly to a given number of decimal places, they need to understand why 0.43 is bigger than 0.413, otherwise the …
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of bar modelling to get pupils to really think about the calculations they are doing. It’s a great way to introduce work with percentages too, and solidifies the link between percentage and fraction calculations. One particular advantage is the flexibility it affords – I had one pupil …
From bar modelling to ratio tables – tidying up percentages 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 »