25 February 2017

Dan Walker's Resources

Dan Walker is one of my favourite TES authors. His clear, uncluttered resources for Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 5 contain quality explanations and clever activities. His slides are well formatted and ready to use, with clear fonts and excellent animated diagrams. In this post I share some examples from Dan Walker's extensive collection which currently stands at 72 resources.

Similarity
These slides cover the whole breadth of this lovely topic, from identifying similar triangles to working with volume and area scale factors. I particularly like the set of questions on forming and solving equations to find unknowns in more complex similarity problems.

These slides incorporate some of my favourite similar triangles activities from Don Steward and the Mathematics Assessment Project. A number of challenging extension tasks are also included.
Coordinates
Here you'll find clear slides on coordinates, with smart animations and excellent activities for both fluency practice and problem solving.
Vectors
I love these slides and activities for teaching vectors. There's a good seven lessons worth of material here, with a couple of activities adapted from Peter Mattock's resources and from an activity on jensilvermath.com (these are all listed in my shape resources library).
Powers, Roots and Index Laws
This set of slides explains how powers and roots work and then goes on to cover index laws in detail. It is packed full of awesome rich tasks and excellent fluency exercises.
Associative and Distributive Laws
I've got a feeling that the associative and distributive laws are often undertaught (or even untaught) at secondary schools this country, so it's nice to see a good quality resource for this topic.
Circle Functions
I'll be using the activities from these slides next week with my Year 11s when I teach them the equation of a circle and tangent to a circle. Like all of Dan's slides, the explanations are clear and the questions are clever.
Completing the Square
This set of slides for completing the square is designed to run from Year 9 through to Year 11. Starting with the basics, it progresses at a good pace to cover trickier quadratics (eg completing the square when a > 1) and identifying turning points.
Pythagoras Puzzle
So far I've only featured slides, but Dan's resources also include worksheet activities (often codebreakers). This puzzle is a nice way to get students doing loads of Pythagoras practice!
Algebraic Manipulation Maze
I like this maze - it's great for exploring common misconceptions.

Dan has made a few of these mazes, including a fractions maze which also has a nice spot the mistake activity.
Statistics 2 PowerPoints
Dan has a number of A level resources in his collection (including D1, D2, M1, M2S1, FP1 and FP2). I've chosen to share an extract from his S2 resources because I successfully used them last year. These are for the Edexcel specification - you get a set of slides for each topic along with an accompanying workbook.
Problem Solving
This is an awesome resource. Dan has pulled together a large collection of puzzles and animated solutions, many from the Junior or Intermediate Maths Challenges. One of the best things about this resource is that it's organised by topic, so it's easy to find challenge questions on specific topics for your lessons. I featured this resource in Gems 48.
Dan's resources also include enrichment topics such as base arithmetic and fractals.

I genuinely would love to share extracts from every single one of Dan Walker's resources, but this post would be rather long! You'll have to explore the rest of the collection yourself. It's all free! I'm in the process of adding all of his resources to my resource libraries.

Dan Walker could have his own website, and for me it would be up there with my favourites - Don Steward and MathsPad. Enjoy exploring his resources! Let me know what you find.





4 comments:

  1. Dan Walker is a Hero of the People.

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  2. This is Great! You are Great! I like this!

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