Mathematical Miscellany #60

Featuring…

Andy Lutwyche – Lazy Lionel series

In my Fill in the blanks post, I featured many excellent resources where students must completely partly worked examples including several from a favourite resource author, Andy Lutwyche. I mentioned some of Andy’s latest resources include his Lazy Lionel resources, Lionel does not show his working, so loses marks! Andy has added further to this collection. We also have Hasty Hazel and Methodical Mabel, these are so good and I’m sure can promote excellent conversations in the classroom on misconceptions and showing sufficient working.

See also Compare & Discuss/Multiple Strategies


White Rose Year 11 end of term assessments

From White Rose Maths, Year 11 end of term assessments for autumn are now available free from their secondary assessments page, scroll down for Autumn Foundation and Higher resources. Mark schemes are also provided.

Staying with White Rose Maths …

White Rose Maths – Barvember 2021

It’s still November, so remember Barvember, from White Rose Maths, which was created to encourage the use of the bar model. Now you can solve the problems using another great digital tool from White Rose Maths, Bar Model. White Rose Maths completed the solution to their day 10 challenge on the Bar Model tool:

Bar models can really help children visualise and then solve maths problems. See Bar Modelling.


NCETM Secondary Mastery Professional Development Materials – Operating on number

NCETM have published KS3 subject knowledge audits; there are 17 audit documents with each one based on one of the core concepts from the NCETM Secondary Mastery Professional Development Materials. For each document, following audit questions with check boxes you can select to show how confident you are, you will find exemplifications and explanations, and further support links. There is space at the end of each document where you can reflect on the material. Further KS3 teaching resources can be found on the 17 core concept webpages.


WolframAlpha

Discussing increasing and decreasing functions with my A level students recently I made the happy discovery that WolframAlpha provides a clear visual representation for such a query, as well as returning the values of x for which the function is increasing and decreasing; we also have the first derivative and critical points.


Since last week’s post on Literacy Skills in Mathematics, I have added resources to that collection. In my post on Proof, I began with the importance of spoken language. Spoken language is so important in students’ development, the KS3 Programme of Study quite rightly stresses the importance of spoken and written language. Both spoken and written language and notation are key. This applies to all key stages from definitions and examples and non-examples at key stage 3 to proof by contradiction – writing negations of statements at KS5. For many students, if their ability to write mathematics clearly and succinctly is poor this may well be a result of their not speaking about mathematics clearly. Conversations in class where students explain their thinking are so valuable.

Resources, where students practice writing expressions from algebraic statements and vice versa, are now included in the literacy post.

Also added are further Transum Mathematics resources as you can find a whole collection of Vocabulary activities on Transum.

Transum Mathematics – Circle Pairs