@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 »
Only a few goodies this week, mostly because I’ve been neglecting Twitter in favour of enjoying the second week of my Easter holidays; normal service resuming next week! @MrChalal01 ~ Link to “What can we learn from Dylan Wiliam and AfL” via Pragmatic Reform. A great blog post looking at what happens when educational research gets …
PIck of Twitter 11/04/15 Read More »
I’m currently a few chapters into Tony Crilly’s book “How Big is Infinity”; I picked this up during a shopping trip on Easter Saturday, following an instruction from a shopping buddy that we should all “treat ourselves to something lovely” – I think she had smellies or clothes in mind; she seemed quite nonplussed that my …
How Big is Infinity (or how I learned to stop worrying and love set theory) Read More »
Got a whole fortnight’s worth of stuff to fit into this post as Easter holidays mean I’ve had a little break from frequent Twitter checking! Here are my picks from the last two weeks: Visual representations (@mrbuckton4maths)A couple of really really nice visual representations for relative frequency and fraction multiplication. I love how the relative …
Pick of Twitter 04/04/2015 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 …
Following my trawl through the xkcd archives to find my favourite comics for A Level, I thought I may as well post some that may be relevant for KS3 and GCSE. There are plenty of funny graphs and pie charts (great for the last five minutes of a lesson), and a few topic-related strips. This post contains a …
xkcd Percentages comics Read More »
If you haven’t heard of xkcd (click now and lose three hours), it’s a webcomic run by Randall Monroe focusing on maths, science and computing. Although some of his comics (mostly the coding ones) go over my head, the maths-based ones are hilarious, and some are great for sharing in lessons – with the caveat that some …
xkcd comics for A Level Read More »
Predictably, lots of the blog posts I’ve read this week have been about the third Maths Conference last Saturday. Having said that, it’s great to read other people’s perspectives and get an idea of what went on in all the workshops I didn’t attend. Here’s a few I’ve enjoyed: @BodliUK ~ 3 Techniques You Should Know, Mastery …
Pick of Twitter 21/03/15 Read More »
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 »