PTB Squares, cubes and their roots
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Resource
Sum of squares
Joseph Louis Lagrange proved in 1770 that every positive integer can be expressed as the sum of 4 or fewer square numbers; see Lagrange’s Four Square Theorem.
Rally Coach
During my NQT year, I worked at a school that was big on cooperative learning and using Kagan structures. I confess, I was never a huge fan – all the jazzy names got a bit complicated and all seemed to have the words “Round” or “Robin” in them. Interestingly, that fad seems to have fallen by the wayside now …
Product sum puzzles for expanding and factorising quadratics
Working forwards These puzzles are useful as a starter or quick introductory activity for expanding standard quadratic expressions. Working backwards Once students have got the hang of how these work, ask them to work the other way around and provide the product and sum to give the required answers. When dealing with negatives, I ask …
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Top 5 for public domain images
While the Internet is possibly the best thing that’s happened to teaching and education in the last thirty years (think TES resources, Twitter, independent sites, quick communication channels), it also comes with a minefield of copyright issues. A couple of weeks before I left my last job, an email went round to all staff reminding …
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Fractions with Cuisenaire rods
As per instruction, I am attempting to finish strong, and I had another really interesting lesson with Year 7 using the NRich Cuisenaire environment today, so I thought I’d go out in style with that. Last Tuesday we did plenty of work with whole numbers and algebraic notation, and I was really keen to explore some fractions with …
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Exploring decimal time
During revision on standard units with Year 9 this week, we dealt with the typical confusions between metric and Imperial – they’re fairly happy with metres and centimetres, but a few are also convinced that inches and feet are too, possibly because they’re still in such common usage.A question that one pupil had was about …
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Five ideas for square numbers
As we’ve got two squares in today’s date, I thought I’d go for a square themed post. Also I’ve just realised that this year contains 25/04/16, and 25/09/16, both even better excuses for a lesson on square numbers. These are all great investigations/rich problems with plenty of practice working with square numbers – a little …
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