5 Maths Gems #133

Welcome to my 133^rd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. New Websites

Diana Reeves (@mathsimum) has launched the first phase of her new website, mathsimum.com, where she has collated maths resources for teaching IGCSE. Many of these resources are useful for GCSE too. This is a superb website - really high quality and well organised. Time for me to retire, I think!

Another excellent new website is sketchcpd.com from Charlotte (@mrshawthorne7). On this website Charlotte shares her sketchnotes which summarise maths education books, podcasts and CPD workshops. These sketchnotes are both beautiful and incredibly helpful.

Devina Jethwa (@Miss_Jethwa) has been making lots of maths A level resources and has shared them on her website jethwamaths.com. This is an absolute treasure trove for A level teachers - resources include worksheets, practice papers, topic tests and calculator tutorials.

2. Equivalence

Thank you to @MrMcI1 for sharing an excellent set of fact families resources which he designed to accompany the White Rose Scheme of Work.

A related task was created by @McGuirea499, shown below. What equations can you make? This is a great example of a 'low floor high ceiling' task.

I love the video Mr McGuire made to go with this. 

 

 Check out more videos on his Youtube Channel.

3. New Tasks

"Look at @giftedHKO's website" should be a standing item in my gems posts, as I seem to feature her resources almost every time I blog! Her latest brilliant contributions include resources for circle theorems, perimeters of semi-circles, proportion with squares and cubes, loci and numeracy.

4. Quadratics

Here's a great task and video 'making links with quadratics' from @McGuirea499. 

5. Order of Operations

Thanks to Jenna Sanderson (@MissJennaMaths) for creating a task for teaching the priority of operations. She made this after watching my Topics in Depth workshop on this topic, which is available to view on my CPD channel.

I like the way Jenna has worked through the solutions using vinculums too:

Update

In my recent post about warm up booklets I mentioned that I will be running a free webinar for NQT and RQT maths teachers in August. If you know someone who might be interested in this, check my blog on Monday as I'm hoping that's when tickets will be made available.

Twitter maths teachers might want to take part in #mathsjournalclub which is making a comeback on 17th August. I really enjoyed this Twitter chat when it originally ran, from summer 2015 to summer 2016. Everyone is welcome to take part - it's a very good way to start engaging on Twitter if you've recently joined. You just need to make sure you've read the piece of research beforehand!

Another activity that maths teachers can take part in this summer is Clarissa Grandi's (@c0mplexnumber) ‘Introduction to Geometric Art’ Zoom course. This live online course takes place on five consecutive Saturdays in August, starting Saturday 1st August, from 11am to 1pm. It's currently sold out, but you can message Clarissa to get on the waiting list, and the course will run again in the autumn.

Also note that La Salle have now put tickets on sale for #mathsconf24 which will take place online on Saturday 3rd October. If you'd like to speak at this conference then you can submit a proposal. At the last La Salle conference only 24% of workshops had a female speaker - this is disproportionately low for the profession, and happened because not many women put themselves forward to speak. So I really want to encourage new speakers - including lots of females - to submit a workshop. 

Finally, check out this Frayer Model display from @AlexB19899. Alex says he introduced "5 minute Frayer time" last year. Pairs of pupils use dictionaries to try to complete their own Frayer models, before completing one together as a class using this display. He said it was great to hear their examples and non-examples.