Happy New Year folks!
Just a quick post today. How to use footage from a classic 1960s show to demonstrate reflection for comedic purposes.
The classic sketch by Harry Worth. Just wait and see how many students try to copy this.
Are you fed up of explaining the difference between a histogram and a bar graph/chart?
Cheer up! Help is at hand…
I teach a class of bright students with very little self-belief in their abilities and total fear of leaving their comfort zone. Instead of telling them what to do and set page X of textbook Y, I let them tell me what was going on and let them take small steps. After all, you wouldn’t take a beginner climber up the North face of the Eiger, would you?
Let us begin:
Download this simple comparison file: What is a Histogram? (pdf)
First I gave the students individual time to write down what they observed. They then compared their answers in pairs/threes. Finally, I collected their observations together on the board (where I had projected up the comparison worksheet).
This hands on approach allowed the students to understand how a histogram is constructed. There were fewer students thinking that histograms are just bar-charts where the bars touch.
Download the step by step worksheet: Histogram calculations step by step
(Alternatively you can download the worksheet with RAG123 self-assessment at the end: Histogram calculations step by step RAG123 )
This worksheet allows students to get the feel for calculating frequency densities without stress. The instructions are gradually removed, until students are just working from a data source. Then students practise drawing histograms.
It is also a handy revision resource – my students referred back to this worksheet when they were stuck in subsequent lessons, rather than ask me!
There are assorted holidays coming up and the weather is getting grim. Time to put your feet up and exercise your brain.
If you like killer Sudokus, logic problems and applied Maths, you’ll love this book. It follows the adventures of Dorothy Gale as she battles her wits against Dr Oz in her journey through the alien world of Oz. The problems are graded so you can work your way up to the harder questions.
You can download a free sample here: Cambridge Press
I have used problems from this book with all ages of senior school student from able Year 8 to Further Maths A-level students. A word of warning though – check the difficulty level before you let students loose on the problems!
Christmas has come early to my local Co-Op. I was intrigued enough to buy and eat the new Christmas chocolate, but not before marvelling at the mathematical elegance of it’s structure:
Image credit: http://www.distinctiveconfectionery.com/personalised-christmas-triangular-toblerone-box.html
The slab of equilateral chocolate breaks up into 9 smaller equilateral triangles. Or you could tessellate more of the big triangle.
Break off the corners and you get a hexagon.
Break off one corner and you get a trapezium.
Two triangles together makes a parallelogram … or it a rhombus? Good discussion point there!
The bar weighs 60g – how much does each triangle weigh? What about the weights of the other shapes you could make?
The dimensions are listed as 180x180x10mm. Where would these measurements fit on the triangle? Is it the length, width and height? Why? Can you calculate the dimensions of the other possible shapes?
Once you start thinking about it, there are lots of activities you could do … and there is the potential to eat your work! As usual, if you are going to do this, make sure you are aware of food allegeries.
Welcome back to the Sandpit! Hope you’ve had a good Summer!
It seems a shame not to keep that summer vibe going, so I thought I’d go back to an old post and reinvent it for a village fete, ‘Great British Bake Off‘, barbeque with friends feeling.
Back in post ’54. Space Saving Displays’(April 2013) I gave an instructional on how to make and use mathematical bunting. Over the summer some great teachers have shared how they are decorating their classrooms with their own twist on old fashioned bunting. I suggest you visit:
Just Maths @Just_Maths
Ideasfortheclassroom @missradders
Today’s post will give you three suggestions:
So here we go:
Equipment
(a) On a sheet of A4 card, get pupils to draw around their hand open and closed:
(b) Cut out the hands – if you turn them over you won’t see the outlines:
(c) You could get the class to use different colours to make it more cheerful. Don’t these look a bit like wings?
(d) The open hands represent a bad habit or trait that students would like to get rid of (or do less). By having the hands downwards the habit is falling out of their hands. Pastorally you could guide students to targets that are appropriate academically or socially. Mathematically these could be study habits or misconceptions. As you can see from the photograph below, it can be tricky getting the wording right – the most important thing is your student understands what they mean.
(e) As mentioned before, the closed hands when paired correctly look like wings. These are for their positive aspirations and goals. A bit cheesy, but you are letting their dreams have wings! If you have time, students could decorate these flags – they can focus on the positive, not the negative. A few years ago, one of my students did this across two hands and reworded the aspiration as ‘These are the hands of an International Rugby player!’ – a big target for a 14 year old, but by the time he left school he was on the County Rugby team, so who knows …
(f) Finally string these up around your room. They won’t get in the way of your existing displays and you can reference them throughout the year.
(g) I was also thinking of taking this idea to a pastoral Year meeting and getting all the tutor teachers to do this activity and then hang them in our line manager’s office!
I happened across the bunting kit in my local Hobbycraft – it usually retails for £2 and includes 25 flags and the string. The link takes you to the relevant page of their website. Similar products are available online from other craft retailers and Amazon.
So if time is tight or you are a little wary of trusting an interesting class with a practical activity this could be a good alternative. You could put bad habits on one side and aspirations on the other.
This bunting demonstrates the beauty (and mathematics) in art from other cultures. The examples come from many cultures including Islam, Buddhism and Christianity and places such as Uzbekistan, Jaipur and Barcelona.
The flags are available to download here:
Multicultural bunting (pdf)
Details:
I printed out my flags onto light card, then laminated them. For added durability I put metal eyelets in the corners (see below). This is by no means essential, but if you are interested in card making or scrap-booking, you may well have some of them in your craft drawer.
Have a great back to school!
Designing good survey questions is an excellent way to discuss bias and structure, however carrying out the survey is always the tricky bit.
No matter how you do it, the results are always sparse and barely useable for a data processing task. How can you get a reasonable data set, generated by pupils, for pupils to use?
I’ve mentioned SurveyMonkey in a previous blog post. It is an online data collection tool with free and subscription services. I asked my Year 9 pupils to write five themed questions, which I then typed into SurveyMonkey. Each set of questions was on a separate page.
I then used our home/school communication system to email a link to the survey to every pupil in their year group, with a covering email. You could distribute the link by asking your fellow maths teachers to tell their classes.
I set the first page of the survey as a list of maths teachers. When my class did the survey they were taken to a class list which they ticked off their name and then did the survey. All other classes were taken straight to the survey. In this way the survey results are anonymous, but I know whether my class have completed it (this was their homework). After two weeks we had 100 completed surveys, out of about 200 pupils. This is an amazing completion rate!
While the data was being collected we looked at data processing skills that would be necessary to collate and process the results. The image below is a sample of the collected data printed from Excel.
After the results were in I printed out a copy of each set of questions and an Excel spreadsheet of their survey results for each group. The themes chosen were: Movies, Music, Shopping, Animals & Sport.
It’s now time for my class to report back on their theme, after dealing with a large data set with anomalies and relate it to their year group. When they have finished I will add a picture of their wall displays. I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop their ideas.
I take no responsibility for this blog post. It is all down to the amazing teachers I work with. We have recently had our Year 6 open day and one of the activities was this amazing tessellation:
As you can see each rhombus has a pattern or picture which links to the next rhombus. You can stand in front of the full wall display and spend ages tracing the different routes across the wall. The clever use of colour means that from a distance the wall pops out as 3D cubes. Older students at school have commented that the display is ‘Awesome!’ and ‘Amazing!.
It was inspired by Vi Hart’s videos on snakes and doodling: YouTube