Mathematical Miscellany #75
A collection of impressive resources… Jake Gordon has been rather busy! Have a look at his “monster of a PowerPoint”. These detailed worked examples are based on the book Teaching math with examples by Michael Pershan. Also inspired by Michael Pershan’s book and her research on self-explanation, have a look at Karen Hancock’s journey into worked examples. From…
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Custom Maths Revision Starters
Thinking about practising skills for GCSE, why not create some custom starters? From Jake Gordon, try his Skills grid creator – customise exactly as you want from 90 skills, and answers are included. On Jonathan Hall’s Test Maker on MathsBot we could create a test to test many of these skills. Choose the skills you…
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Mudd Math Fun Facts
This searchable collection, Mudd Math Fun Facts from Harvey Mudd College Math Department has resources that can make great starter activities, perhaps try Squares Ending in 5 and Multiplication by 11 both made excellent starters. I have looked at proofs for these with students as well as enjoying the mental Maths tricks! It is possible to search by topic, difficulty…
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Bell Work
At the beginning of a lesson, I like to get everybody busy straight away, making a calm start to the lesson and very much like the idea of so-called ‘bell’ work. Give students a task that is simple to understand and requires no more than a simple instruction, question/s and/or diagram on the board (no technology…
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Knowledge Organisers – Mathematics
In a post on Cognitive Science in the Classroom, I mentioned Knowledge Organisers, or to be more precise I mentioned Kris Boulton’s “When shouldn’t I use knowledge organisers?”. Kris has written on why they are less applicable to maths. Certainly, I had not used knowledge organisers for Mathematics myself with one exception, I have used …
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Advanced Starters – Transum
Chancing upon this tweet from Transum proved fortunate. Hidden gems indeed, I had not noticed the Advanced Starters before, some of which I think could be useful for students aiming at the highest GCSE grades as well as for Advanced Level students. The problem, Find the Radius, illustrated in the tweet is very neat! Looking at the Main Transum Starters page I…
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Here’s the diagram…
What’s the question? (This post is an update of my post from 2013 and now includes the more recent, excellent resource Goal Free Problems from Peter Mattock.) Using diagrams as prompts like this is excellent for Retrieval Practice. Seeing this well-received resource, GCSE Question Prompts on TES reminded me that I have successfully used this idea myself…
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Arithmagons
What is an arithmagon?Clearly, the numbers in the rectangles are the sum of the numbers in the adjacent circles. Of course, there is no need to use addition and no need to use triangular arithmagons! These could be used with students of all ages. Young children could practice basic skills or students studying advanced Mathematics could…
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Mobile Puzzles – Algebra
The Transition to Algebra (TTA) project, an initiative of the Learning and Teaching Division at Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) includes a wonderful collection of Mobile Puzzles. Visit solveme.edc.org to play SolveMe Mobiles (also available for the iPad.) Looking at the menu, you will see categories with different levels of difficulty available from very simple puzzles to rather more…
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Number Operations
Questions such as this can make a great starter for a lesson and provide the chance to discuss number operations and the relationships between them. Manipulating numbers like this can also help with algebraic manipulation. Looking for some more examples of this type, I came across a really useful resource on TES, “If I know…
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