fraction arithmetic

It’s been a while since I last did a Pick of Twitter, which is personally quite annoying because it’s my only way of chronicling all the good stuff I see on there – I’m going to try and get back into the habit on Sundays from now on!

• @mjfenton: A lovely list of quotes from teachers explaining why they use Twitter.
• @DavidHilton_OCR: A blog from OCR comparing the new and old SAMs and explaining the alterations to individual questions in some detail. It’s interesting to read about the scaffolding added to some questions and the use of spacing or bullet-pointing to make questions more accessible, which isn’t something that springs consciously to mind when comparing exam papers.
• @mathsjem: Jo’s Maths Gems posts always get my vote – check out her back catalogue if you haven’t already done so. This time around, I particularly enjoyed the “209 seconds” video (which I will also now be using to introduce standard form) and the Alphabet lesson, which has a lot of potential for use with new Year 7s – they are taught in form groups for the first week or so while we do a baseline test with them, so any easily differentiable activity like that works really well.
• @MrNickHart: An interesting post about using bar modelling to multiply fractions and integers. I haven’t bothered doing a lot of bar modelling for multiplication this year, preferring to bar model fractions of amounts and then explain that the calculations 1/2 of 50 and 1/2 x 50 are equivalent. I do like the use of number-lines though!
• @jillberry102: Retweet of a link from @unseenflirt‘s blog post “Does teacher training know too much?“, which makes thought-provoking reading for anyone who’s ever mentored a trainee teacher. 
• @sxpmaths: The most entertaining post about painting a kitchen I’ve ever read! “Dysfunctional Maths” rubbishes a few of the favourite contexts of our exam boards and looks at the real real-life skills behind doing a bit of decorating.