Category Archives: General

156. Tweeting tips

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Here’s a quick idea for revising or researching vocabulary: Maths tweets.

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I know that lots of educators on Twitter like to use tweets to summarise learning. I used this with my Year 7s to investigate the meanings of Prime, Factor, Multiple, Square number and Cube number.

After they independently researched the meanings and wrote the definitions in their books, I challenged them to summarise their learning in 140 characters or less. They then filled in their ‘tweets’.

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If they had leftover characters they could create their own hashtags.

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The ‘Maths Tweets’ sheet didn’t take long to put together – you can download the maths tweets template here (pdf format).

151: TMNW 1 – Puzzle maker

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As promised, I’ve been trying out ideas from TeachMeet North West at Calderstones School. Here’s the first post:

My colleague J had mentioned Discovery Puzzlemaker last term, but I’d not had time to try it out. Then Fiona Bate @fibate used it as part of her presentation on ‘Profound thinking in the classroom’.

How I used Puzzlemaker
I decided to test this out on my Year 9 students – they are a bright bunch and there are a lot of them. I put out tile puzzles on sheets of A5 and the class settled to the starter task, after they’d got their books out. There were lots of different strategies and eventually everyone cracked the code – the formula for the area of a circle.

Blank puzzle

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Different strategies

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The funniest part was later in the lesson. A student put his hand up and said he couldn’t remember the rule for the area of a circle. More than one of his peers pointed out he’d just spent ten minutes cracking a code where the rule was given and it was still on his desk in front of him!

Lesson Objectives
Luke O’Hanlon @funkwalkee did a presentation on ‘Ways to engage with Learning Objectives’. This linked nicely with using Puzzlemaker to discover the aim of the lesson, as well as encourage independent learning and problem solving. Once the class had cracked the code they knew what they’d be doing that day.

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Puzzlemaker

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As you can see, Discovery Puzzlemaker is a really useful tool. I’m going to use some of the larger puzzles as homework tasks for my lower ability classes as I can tailor them to their specific needs. I’m starting with the ‘Hidden Message’ task to reinforce circle vocabulary.

Thank you to J, Fiona and Luke for sharing this site/their ideas.

150. TeachMeet fever

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This weekend I was at TeachMeet NorthWest at Calderstones School in Liverpool. A TeachMeet is a free event where anyone can present so long as it’s relevant to education and only lasts 5 minutes.

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It was the first TM I’ve been to and I also presented. I’m not sure if anyone understood the opening line of ‘S’mae, dw i’n hoffi deinosoriaid’ (Hi, I like dinosaurs) but at least I did my best for languages day as a Maths ASTosaurus*.

Reflecting on the whole event, I can safely say that it was the most energising CPD event I’ve ever attended. You could never run such a diverse event as a fee paying course. The element of the unknown, not knowing what the next topic would be, kept everyone engaged. The pace didn’t let up – there was no time to get bored or doodle on handouts. By the time I got home, my colleague J and myself had already discussed half a dozen ideas we would implement and come up with a Departmental project that would be good for both our Performance Management and whole school BLP focus.

So, I’m taking a week out of blogging to try out all these amazing ideas that are buzzing around my head. Then I’ll share who the brains are behind the ideas (so you can follow them on Twitter) and the impact they’ve had.

* I describe myself as an ASTosaurus as the AST grade was abolished nationally this year. There are still ASTs, but most are being moved to Lead Practitioner roles.

For those who don’t know, an AST is an Advanced Skills Teacher. To become one, you must prove yourself to be outstanding in all areas and pass an assessment. Unlike Excellent teachers and Lead Practitioners, ASTs can only be assessed by an assessment body from London. Less than 5% of teachers are ASTs and now we are going the way of the dinosaurs.

149. Cold Questioning

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Cold calling is the infuriating practice of randomly contacting people in order to sell something that they don’t want and didn’t ask for. Don’t ask me for my opinion on this business idea!

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Cold questioning is the practice of putting a random question on the board and asking pupils to solve it.

Example: GCSE revision
I have a class of critical C/D students who are sitting their GCSE in November. We have been revising prime factorisation, indices, simplifying, standard form and HCF/LCM. Today I put this question on the board:

A pair of trainers are reduced by 30%. The sale cost is £75, how much were they originally, to the nearest £1?

I was pleased to see them talk about the problem and have a go.

Students were randomly selected to share their answers and only two answers occurred – both of them wrong, but with a hint of understanding. Answer A resulted from calculating 30% of £75 and adding it on. Answer B resulted from subtracting the 30% from £75.

Now this isn’t as depressing as you may think, because as we discussed this it became evident that the class were confident calculating simple percentages – they just struggled to apply this knowledge. One student said they had used a multiplier. This opened up the task as we developed the link between reverse percentages and multipliers. Some of the class weren’t convinced, so we had a quick ‘converting percentages to multipliers, including inc/dec’ quiz. We even extended it to fraction to decimal conversion.

Finally, we looked at rounding as it was specified in the original question.

Review
I could have prepared a step-by-step revision lesson, gently taking them through these topics. I think ‘ambushing’ the class with a topic they haven’t studied for a while was more effective as they used a variety of skills to solve the problem, rather than repeat given procedures.

Ambushing your class
*Pick a topic you haven’t looked at for a while
*Avoid easy/obvious questions
*Try to include more than one skill
*Allow sufficient thinking/discussing time
*Finish off with another question, which requires similar skills
(Eg my second question was a reverse percentage involving an increase)

145. Soroban counts

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I found this really useful book set on a second-hand market stall in the summer. I felt it was worth a look for £3.

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It is Aba-Conundrums by Evelyn B. Christensen, published by Fat Brain Toy Co. The set includes a soroban, 120 number puzzles (& solutions) on spiral-bound dry-wipe card and dry-wipe pen.

The problem solving elements of the tasks are really good for improving basic number skills.

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After boring four generations of my family with it, I did a bit of web-searching and came across the Soroban Cymru website – don’t worry if you don’t ‘siarad Cymraeg’, it’s in English.

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I think proper use of sorobans  could be a really useful tool for developing the understanding of number in low ability Year 6/7. I know they are used by all abilities in Asia, but pupils here don’t generally know how to use a soroban correctly and it could be a way to make numbers more interesting for those who disconnected from maths at a young age. I’m certainly going to try it out this term.

You can get basic sorobans on Amazon from about £2.50.

144. Gadget of the Day 5

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A thing of geeky beauty today:

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This is a Pocket Decoder for Geocachers, for codebreaking on the go! If you are not into geocaching, it’s still a thing of beauty. The dial is replaceable, meaning you can use it to crack a variety of codes.

Find out more here.