Jeffrey Ventrella’s Composite Number Tree

I was reminded this morning of why Twitter can be so useful – I usually check the latest #mathchat tweets and saw Richard Wade’s tweet with a link to the latest Teach Maths newsletter, on ‘Ten Great Ideas’. The first item includes this wonderful Composite Number Tree by Jeffrey Ventrella – I’m looking forward to trying that with students after half term. I think it would make a great starter. Students could work out themselves how the tree is being formed and comment on any patterns they notice. Also included in the first Newsletter item is the excellent Primitives application by Alec McEachran, I included this myself with some resources for looking at Prime Factors in an earlier post.

It’s a small world! I see the second item is on Craig Barton’s Web Whizz video on Teachmathematics. You can see all Craig’s videos here on TES Resources.

On WolframAlpha, if you query on a word you can see a word frequency history, see this on Mathematics for example (the history is based on a Google books sample of one million books). An opportunity for some cross curricular work perhaps?

WolframAlpha is still free to check working for as many queries as you want making it very useful for students but now step by step solutions are limited to three a day unless you sign up to WolframAlpha Pro, so choose your three carefully! The new style step by step solutions are clearly presented – see this integration by parts for example:

(See this page for WolframAlpha examples showing the syntax for many different queries. I have added a couple of new slideshows for older students recently, on Set Theory & Logic and Differential Equations).

I mentioned Numberplay from The New York Times in a recent post but it’s worth another mention, they have some excellent articles. (Note this is included on the Reading page).

Finally, still on the subject of reading, I enjoyed Andrew Old’s post on ‘What Ofsted Say They Want’. Just what is good teaching all about? This is so sensible!

For UK teachers I hope you enjoyed half term last week or like me are looking forward to a week off this coming week!