I stumbled across this website ages ago and I still go back for this activity.
Who knew a crazy squirrel could take the fear out of basic pythagoras?
The picture is Secret Squirrel and Morroco Mole – if you remember them, you’ve probably been teaching quite a while …
I originally did this activity for a class that I taught twice in a day, but it would work equally well on sequential days.
Equipment
Recipe cards labelled A, B, C, D
Microwave or friendly food tech teacher who will lend you their room
Rice Crispies (or Cornflakes)
Chocolate
Bowls & spoons
Oven glove
Cake cases
Aim
If you haven’t guessed from the equipment list, you are making chocolate rice crispie cakes to investigate ratio.
Before you start
You need to have at least 4 different recipe cards. Two of them should have the same ratio of chocolate to cereal, but in different quantities. I had one as double the other. The other two should have common errors eg adding rather than multiplying to increase.
Practical
The messy part.
Make the rice crispie cakes and leave them to set. You should make sure each set of cakes is labelled with the recipe letter.
Discussion
This is the fun part. Taste testing in the second lesson – they will be keen to get started.
Each pupil tries each recipe and comments on how they taste. Depending on your recipes, one should be too dry, one should be too chocolatey* and two should be identical. You can then look at the recipes to explain this by comparing quantities and introducing ratio.
*Some will say you cannot have too much chocolate, but if you use Mars bars the high sugar content means they go rock hard if there is not enough cereal. So hard in fact that two boys decided to eat a whole cake each because no one else wanted them and they were quiet for more than ten minutes!
You’re being watched…
I first did this activity 10 years ago when I knew I was being watched by my Head of Department in the tasting/discussion section. The class were a bouncy low ability Y9 group.
They loved it, my HoD loved it and it’s never let me down as a lesson concept since.
A different way to look at data and probability is to introduce letter frequency analysis.
I set pupils the task of finding out the letter frequency data for the english language. Not much of a challenge for a bright student with the internet.
However …
I then gave them four A4 sheets of symbols to decode. Literally four pages of code, with no hints except they had to determine two literary works and authors from it. They had two weeks to solve it.
In hindsight, they described it as the best homework ever. I had parents contact me to see if they had solved it correctly – not to help their child, they were in competition to see who would get it first!
How to do it
Pick a text which is freely available on the internet – it saves typing out pages of text. I chose ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll – lots of interesting words!
I found a great website which gives you the Dancing man cipher amongst others. You paste in your text and select your substitution cipher. It then encodes your text for you. I chose the Dancing Man as it was the second literary work: The Adventure of the Dancing men (A Sherlock Holmes story)
I pasted this into Word and this formed the homework.
The interesting thing about this substitution cipher is that it has 52 symbols and no spaces. It is tricky to cheat as you would have to know the name of the cipher and the full cipher was not published in the book. There is more than one variation of the code as different people have tried to fill in the missing symbols.
Classics
This task ticks all the boxes for data processing, coding, independent study and literacy. In fact several pupils came back and said they had read Conan-Doyle’s classic work as a result of a maths task.
This made me laugh:
Originally seen on Pinterest, linking to Fail blog
The main thing that caught my attention was how the infographic is constructed and how it could be used for other tasks. It’s made using Grafio. The app is available as a lite (free) version or a paid business version (£5.99 at the time of posting). Not available on Android devices.
This activity started as a simple card game to assess if pupils knew the difference between Similarity and Congruence. It’s grown into four tasks appropriate for small groups or whole classes, whether it is sunny or rainy.
Aim
To identify when simple shapes are similar and when they are congruent.
Equipment
Two identical sets of cards, either playing card size or A3/4. The cards can be downloaded in pdf or Word format here.
Mini-whiteboards (optional)
Chalk (optional)
Game 1: Snap
Using a set of playing cards, pairs or small groups of pupils play snap. Usual rules apply, with a twist. Instead of shouting ‘Snap’, you shout ‘Similar’ or ‘Congruent’. If you get it right, you win the cards. If you get it wrong, your opponent gets the cards.
Game 2: Find a …
Each pupil is given a card. The teacher says ‘Congruent’ and they must find a partner who is congruent to them. The teacher checks the pairs.
The pupils swap cards with their partner and the game restarts. The teacher continues to say congruent or similar until everyone has tried out a variety of shapes.
Game 3: Quiet cards
The teacher has two stacks of shuffled A4 cards at the front and the pupils have whiteboards. The teacher holds up two cards and the pupils secretly write down ‘Similar’, ‘Congruent’ or ‘Neither’. The class then share their results.
Variation: If a pupil gets it wrong, their whiteboard is taken away. The winner is the last pupil with a whiteboard.
Game 4: Loud cards
This works on a similar principle to quiet cards, except you are outside and louder.
Using chalk, allocate an area for each of the three answers. When the teacher holds up a pair of cards the pupils walk* to the correct answer. Pupils can be eliminated in a similar way to Game 4.
*Disclaimer: You know they are going to be running to their answers.
Romanesco Broccoli (Roman Cauliflower): mathematical art in a vegetable.
You can link the naturally occuring spirals to Fibonacci numbers in a similar way to the classic pine cone spirals.
Makes good cauliflower cheese too!
Okay, I may be a Maths geek, but bad spelling drives me crazy!
