The second puzzle on the Zoombinis’ journey is the Stone Cold Caves, and another based mostly on sorting and sets. There are four caves, guarded by two pairs of rock trolls. The two smaller trolls on the furthest left and right determine whether a particular Zoombini can travel up that path, while the two larger …
Zoombini Maths – Sorting using Carroll diagrams in the Stone Cold Caves Read More »
The very first impasse that the Zoombinis tackle is the Allergic Cliffs . Much like most puzzles in the game, the object is to get the Zoombinis across or through some physical feature in the landscape – in this case, a massive gulf between two cliffs, straddled by two rickety rope bridges. The “faces” on …
Zoombini Maths – Sneezing Cliffs and set theory Read More »
Half term’s been unusually busy for me – normally I earmark this week in October for catching up with school-work and sleep, but instead, my husband decided we needed a few days away. We popped off to Portugal from Saturday to Wednesday, giving me a complete break from my laptop, marking, Twitter and providing me …
Zoombini Maths and a new blog challenge Read More »
Year 9 and I have been working on algebraic expressions this week, and the lesson I taught yesterday was successful enough to deserve a “Lesson of the Week” post. We did the Standards Unit card sort earlier in the week, which was far more successful than usual, possibly because I attempted to structure the activity far more …
LOTW – Expressions using algebra tiles Read More »
Blogs ‘Practice Math Like a Baby’ from @benorlin – this has to be one of the best examinations of repeated practice I’ve read recently. ‘A Strange Step-by-Step Solution’ from @DrBennison, featuring this slightly suspect resource. Resources A lovely interactive resource for writing and understanding formulae, which I’m looking forward to using with my other Year 10 class later this week …
Pick of Twitter 11/10/15 Read More »
This picture completely mystified my Year 10 class this week… To put things into context, we were working on a standard set of simple rearrangement (for them) of formulae, with absolutely no real-life context (contrived or otherwise) mentioned in the questions. The textbook authors appeared to have just plonked an image of a scary-looking skeleton (reminds …
Design matters (a #mathsconf5 blog) Read More »
Blogs #mathsconf5 blogs from @MathsPadJames, @mathsjem, @PhilMcBride73, @WorkEdgeChaos and @EmathsUK. ‘Is Sh****ai Still a Dirty Word’ from @Craigos87. ‘Maths Mindsets: My Year 10s’ from @headguruteacher. Resources Fluency, reasoning and problem-solving assessments from @HelenHindle1. Prime number pictures from one of my #mathsconf5 speed-dates, @TheNerdLP. Other awesome stuff
Pick of Twitter 04/10/15 Read More »
As I mentioned in my blog about #mathsconf5, I’ve recently acquired a Microsoft LifeCam for my classroom and I’ve been playing with it rather a lot this past week. I need to take some photos of the setup in my classroom, but it’s basically a small portable plug-and-play webcam with accompanying software to take pictures, videos and …
Tripping the Life-Cam-tastic Read More »
This is likely to be a short-ish blog, with more detailed posts about the really good bits later this week. I don’t know if it’s just me, but spending seven hours in a hot leisure centre has given me the worst headache, and I really want to be curling up on the sofa with a …
Tonight’s #mathschat is about New (School) Year’s Resolutions. I wrote a post back at the start of my summer blog challenge (I’ve just checked – it was in fact post number 1!) in which I wrote some targets for the new school year. Put the two together and I thought it would be time for a short, …