It seems appropriate to start this post with these brilliant March Calendars from Wayne Chadburn.
Almost March so time to download this months Little Bit of Maths revision calendars to help support students preparing for…?? Higher, Foundation+ and Foundation calendars AND solutions available – non calculator this month. https://t.co/xDz75aLPOtpic.twitter.com/VPEOaaAo93
For a little bit of Maths each day students can use one of these March Calendars. There are calendars available for Foundation, Foundation+ and Higher. All the calendars can be downloaded from the above link. All are designed to be non-calculator calendars. You can check your answers with the solutions provided.
Attending the events will help both teachers and students link maths curriculum learning to careers, thus fulfilling Gatsby Benchmark 4.
4. Linking curriculum learning to careers
All teachers should link curriculum learning with careers. For example, STEM subject teachers should highlight the relevance of STEM subjects for a wide range of future career paths.
Students need to be confident in applying the four operations to positive and negative numbers; the image above shows the subject content included in GCSE (age 14-16) Maths specifications. KS3 (age 11-14) students too are required to be fluent with negative numbers.
A look at some resources to develop understanding of operations with positive and negative integers and exercises for practice …
I’ll mention the ‘sign rules’ here as they cause much confusion and many misconceptions, we need to word these so carefully. In fact, we need some more examples to stress we are talking about adjacent like signs. Look at -4−-3 and -4−-6 for example.
MathsBot – Directed Number – MCQ Generator
From Jonathan Hall, on MathsBot, generate all the addition and subtraction multiple-choice questions you want with his brilliant Directed Number MCQ Generator. I really like the option to have questions using counters of varying relative sizes.
Corbett Maths provides us, as always, with videos and many practice examples. Scroll down the list to Negatives for a set of resources.
On Dr Frost Maths, see the KS3 Negative Number resources, note that the downloadable resource (slides which cover the four operations) and the video can be accessed without signing in.
I’ll mention the ‘sign rules’ here as they cause much confusion and many misconceptions, we need to word these so carefully. In fact, we need some more examples to stress we are talking about adjacent like signs. Look at -4−-3 and -4−-6 for example.
I like the wording here, students are often confused with sign rules when adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers.
I couldn’t agree more with Siân, it’s always a pleasure listening to Simon Singh as it was listening to all the other great presentations at the February TM Maths Icons Conference. An amazing day – thank you so much @TMMathsIcons.
Not a conventional competition, but to challenge your able mathematicians, try Parallel from Simon Singh. All materials and resources are completely free and teachers will have access to all the student scores from the Parallelograms which are automatically marked.
Students earn points depending on their percentage score on each Parallelogram, which in turn earns mathematical badges. Even before you create an account Even without an account, you can get a taste of what we offer by just clicking on the Parallelograms on the left. Have a look at this parallelogram on Pie Charts and Speed Reading for example.
The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
The references to Simon’s book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets was a reminder of all the brilliant Maths hidden in The Simpsons. Information for teachers on the book is available, including a PowerPoint presentation for teachers Simon Singh has created, notes are given with the slides.
It was also a reminder that back in 2014 I was honoured to feature a post featuring answers by Simon Singh to my questions.
I enjoyed all the sessions, including Robert Southern on Graphical Transformations.
My own presentation was on the use of Colour in Mathematics and all the slides and some further links referenced in the slides are available on a dedicated page.
The puzzle at the beginning of the post which apparently Bart got before the rather more nerdy Lisa featured in the episode Lisa the Simpson.