Mar 29 2020

Mathematical Miscellany #38

A reminder of all the great resources on Jonathan Hall’s Mathsbot – there are so many activities which students can use whilst working at home; with answers provided for students to check, they are getting feedback as they work. A recent edition is the student version of Do Now. Students could try for example Differentiated Questions or a topic ladder of their choice.

Nrich is of course an outstanding source of resources. Yesterday morning I thoroughly enjoyed the web version of London Maths – thank you to Charlie Gilderdale for a great session. One of the resources we looked at was Cryptarithms, mathematical puzzles where the digits in a sum have been replaced by letters. This task has a carefully chosen collection of problems of increasing difficulty and it struck me as a good resource that students could work on from home – the problems could be printed off and then students can get away from the screen and work on paper.

For more on working at home, see Bring on the Maths and A Level Mathematics – Have you seen…?

Visit the museums from home!

From the Science Museum, Mathematics in our World which looks at how mathematics connects to so many aspects of our lives and see also this collection of mathematical objects. Seeing the Spirograph, a favourite childhood toy reminds me of the brilliant digital version, Inspirograph by Nathan Friend. Try altering the gears so that the fixed and rotating gear are the same size, or make one size a factor of the other, make the two sizes have a common factor, or not! Investigate. You can change the colours too and create a work of Art!

Inspirograph by Nathan Friend

$Virtual Math Museum$ For some beautiful images try the 3DXM Virtual Math Museum. Have a look at all those plane curves for example and note that you can select individual curves and change parameters…see this pdf for further details.

Have a look at the Google Art Project which features Art museums from around the world. The project also has user-created galleries, which teachers can use to create themed presentations of artwork from different collections. Try a search on mathematics.

Mar 24 2020

A Level Mathematics, have you seen…?

…these resources from The King’s School, Chester?

The Mathematics Department have written chapter booklets to accompany Dr Jamie Frost’s presentations. The booklets have been designed to be used by students to fill in whilst studying from the accompanying Dr Frost presentation. (These are a first edition which the staff say will be tweaked over the summer holidays.

EdExcel A-Level Pure and Applied chapter booklets now available on TES (links below), apologies we couldn’t share from OneNote. Will upload Further Maths tonight. As ever, thank you to @DrFrostMaths. We will refine over the summer, but in the meantime we hope they are useful!

— King’s School Maths (@KSCMaths) March 23, 2020

The resources have uploaded to TES, see this TES search; alternatively this Twitter thread has a link to each set of resources on TES (you don’t have to be a Twitter user to access the link).

Mar 22 2020

Bring on the Maths

…and much more!

In a post in September 2014, I wrote:

I must recommend the free samples from Bring On the Maths, the Core 3 activity – Logarithmic equations worked really well with my Year 13 class and next week I’ll use the C4 Binomial Expansion resource when we are talking about the validity of a given expansion. I have used the Trigonometric Ratios resource before – and will again; there are several other great resources in that list of samples – explore!

Free access is available to the complete set of these resources on the old Kangaroo Maths site. Log in with the user and password as above to access all the resources. This will give access to all the activities for students from Key Stage 2 right through to A Level – note that this being the old site, the resources are aligned to earlier schemes of learning but still so useful.

Looking at the old level 5 and 6 Algebra resources for example, we could try Simplifying Expressions or Constructing and solving equations.

Distance Learning will be demanding for many children and parents, they need time to relax too, it’s certainly a chance to read more or perhaps get away from screens and listen to a story. For as long as schools are closed, Audible are providing stories which are free to stream on a desktop, laptop, phone or tablet. An extensive collection of stories, including titles across different languages is available. No accounts or passwords are needed. See Audible’s ‘How to Use Stories‘ and start listening; note the menu where children can select by age.

I have often mentioned White Rose Maths who have so many free high quality resources, see for example Secondary Schemes of Learning and Assessments for End of Block or End of Term. Check their Home Learning, the White Rose Maths Team has prepared a series of five maths lessons for each year group from Year 1-8. More will be added each week for the next few weeks. Every lesson comes with a short video showing clearly and simply how to help children to complete the activity successfully.

On CIMT there are interactive tutorials for Years 7, 8 and 9.

CIMT Interactive Material – Year 9 Indices

Mathsbox is a subscription (excellent value) site but all the Quick Cover Lessons have been made available free on TES Resources. Each each lesson includes examples/methods with 30 to 60 questions – answers.

And now available…

Mathsbox – Weekly Skills Checks

Also, free for everyone Weekly Checks for Year 3 to GCSE.

MEI are providing additional support during school/college closures; a package of free resources to support remote teaching is available.

The summer term includes work on consolidation for the year, note my post on Knowledge Oragnisers, particularly the collection from Nicola Whiston who has

started a collection of Knowledge Organisers which follow the White Rose Schemes of Learning, she is sharing the collection here, via Dropbox. These are really attractive and I think will appeal to students.

Craig Barton has shared links to many resources and ideas in his post: Covid-19: School closures – free maths support, resources and ideas.

CK-12 Foundation has created a resource page with hand-picked lessons in math and science popular during the month of March.

From Bobby Seagull, “The Magic of Numbers: Why Everyone Should Love Maths”.

From Tom Sherrington – see Setting Work for a long-haul shut-down.

And some brilliant CPD from Tom Sherrington, see his ‘Rosenshine Masterclass Captured. Free CPD!‘

In case this is useful for anyone – a post for students here; this includes links to Notes and Videos.

Stay safe everyone.

Mar 15 2020

Further Mathematics

Some updates to the series of pages on Further Mathematics.
Still a work in progress, but the pages to date are:

I have updated the Teaching Resources page with additional content and am adding additional posts I have written on Further Mathematics.

New pages have been added, see Notes and Examples, Legacy Papers as well as the posts on Calculus, Differential Equations and Linear Programming.

AQA Topic Test

OCR A Section Check In Test

See also this series of pages and tutorials on calculators.

Watch this space…!

Mar 8 2020

Women in Mathematics

March 8th 2020 is International Women’s Day.
We’ll start with an image I have shared before that I think still says it all! Thank you, Steve Lomax (Photo courtesy of the wonderful children of Mansfield Green E-ACT Primary, @mgeact @EducationEACT) who shared this wonderful response to the task ‘Describe a mathematician’…

Some useful references on women in Mathematics:

From the American Mathematical Society: Women Doing Mathematics. Note there is much information on this site. Women@NASA caught my eye.
European Women In Mathematics
MIT highlight MIT Women in Mathematics
Follow @womeninmaths the Women in Mathematics Committee of the London Mathematical Society (@LondMathSoc).
From the Cambridge Core blog, Influential women in STEM

From Lucy Rycroft-Smith, see this wonderful collection of books about Maths by women. Lucy has chosen 13 books, I like the way she has categorised the books, a book for the artist, for the rebel…. Brilliant – I can see some in there I want!

From the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme, Find ways to encourage girls to study Mathematics. Note the free resources here, including (for girls and boys!) Maths, Opening the door to your future, a leaflet which explores the post-16 maths qualifications available to students, to help them decide which one is best. There is a girls’ participation self-audit resource to review your strategy and identify aspects to develop.

Note too the 30 minute presentation, Why Study Maths, for students and parents/carers which is about the importance of studying maths post-GCSE. It outlines the options available, and provides compelling reasons for choosing to take an advanced maths qualification. Slides and speaker notes are available to download. These resources could be an excellent way of helping Mathemics Departments link curriculum learning to Careers, for all students, helping to meet the Gatsby Benchmark on this.

And for some History