5 Maths Gems #91

Welcome to my 91^st gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. World Cup Box Plots
Thanks to Southborough Maths (@Mathsteam1) for sharing these box plots created by @johnwmillr. They show the distributions of height by position for players in the World Cup. They make for great discussions with students, and provide a nice demonstration of how box plots can help us make comparisons.

I've been using a similar set of graphs for years, every time I teach box plots (see my post on teaching box plots for more on this). It always goes down well.

2. Variation Theory
Last week Craig Barton launched a new website packed full of sets of well written questions for intelligent practice. Do check out variationtheory.com if you haven't already seen it.

'Rearranging formulae' by Danielle Moosajee

'Mixed Bases' by Joe Berwick 

Like Craig's other resource websites (SSDDs, Venns and Diagnostic Questions), you can submit your own resources for inclusion on this website.

3. Fractions
Thanks to Berkeley Everett‏ (@BerkeleyEverett) for sharing this animation. This can be found, along with loads of other great animations, on the Math Visuals website. 

4. Compound Shapes
Thanks to Mark Ives (@MarkIvesTeach) for showing us how he used Numicon to support students in identifying the lengths of sides in compound shapes.

5. Coordinates Problems
Thanks to Dave Taylor (@taylorda01) for a sharing a set of challenging coordinates problems (see this tweet and this tweet) . Here are a couple of examples:

Update
Do maths teachers all say things in the same way? At the Tweet Up in Manchester last weekend, I recorded a group of teachers saying words that I've heard pronounced differently by different maths teachers. I've picked three of these words for the first video from my pronunciation project:

Thank you to everyone who took part! It may not be the most exciting video ever but I think it's really interesting that students hear different things from different teachers.

Here are a few other things you might have missed recently:

• ThinkMaths (@thinkmaths) are doing their annual giveaway of maths goodies - the 'Exciting Maths Toys for Excited Maths Teachers Mailout' - sign up now!
• I'll be taking part in the Big Internet Math-Off in July - and I'd really appreciate your support! 
• Check out this great post from Alex Cutbill (@intersectarian) about the definition of 'power' in maths. This is what I was talking about in my conference session last Saturday.
• Do check out the excellent set of surds questions from Gillian Matthewson (@gmathewson1) on her new blog.
• The Nuffield Foundation report "How do shortages of maths teachers affect the within-school allocation of maths teachers to pupils?" is worth a read.
• I recorded a podcast after the JustMaths conference with Craig Barton which is now online - you can listen to it here. It's only half an hour!

Ten years after we did our PGCE together, I finally met up with Colin Hegarty! He came to my school to launch Hegarty Maths at our first annual trust maths conference. This is really exciting - Hegarty Maths is awesome. I loved trialling it with my Year 11s this year. Thank you to both Colin and Simon Petri from the Surrey Plus Maths Hub for their excellent presentations.

It's all been a bit crazy lately. Next week I have an AQA Expert Panel Meeting, the BBO Maths Hub conference, a TTRS Rock Wrangle trip, and prom. Then I can relax!

I'll leave you with this lovely factor tree puzzle from Sarah Carter (@mathequalslove), inspired by @HaroldReiter.

Conference Round Trip

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to present at two excellent maths conferences over the last few days. On Saturday I was at La Salle’s #mathsconf15 in Manchester, and on Monday I was at the JustMaths conference at Alton Towers. I did a three night round trip, travelling by train with a huge backpack.

I used to publish very detailed write ups of every maths conference I attended - in fact I used to be one of the only people who did so. But now there are loads of teachers blogging about conferences. This is fantastic! I love seeing so much enthusiasm for maths teaching. So I won’t go into great detail about the conferences in this post - not because I didn’t have a great time and learn a lot, but just because you can read far better write ups elsewhere.

If you do want to hear my personal reflections in more detail, I recommend you listen to the two conference takeaway podcasts that I've recorded with Craig Barton. The #mathsconf15 podcast is already out, and the JustMaths podcast will be out next week.

#mathsconf15
At #mathsconf15 I presented on Indices in Depth. This presentation took me months to pull together! I've shared the slides here, but bear in mind they make a lot more sense when I talk through them:

• Conference PowerPoint (45 minutes)
• Full length PowerPoint (uncut)
• Handout (indices problems)

Do have a go at the problems in the handout if you have a few minutes. Delegates showed me multiple approaches to the final question.

The idea behind my slides is that you can present them yourself at school when your department is about to teach indices. Links and sources are in the notes at the bottom of each slide.

I hope to follow this up with a presentation on fractional and negative indices at a future conference. My full collection of 'topics in depth' packs (which is growing very very slowly) is available here.

If you'd like to read about the key points from my workshop then check out the conference write-ups from these lovely bloggers: Jess Prior, Atul Rana, Danielle Moosajee, Ed Watson, Richard Tock and Rachel Mahoney.

In response to a tweet about my workshop, Susan Russo (@Dsrussosusan) replied with a brilliant powers resource from YummyMath that I'd not seen before:

I love this. I've added it to my number resource library.

At the Tweet Up I did some filming for my 'Pronunciation Project'. Thank you to everyone who agreed to be filmed - such helpful people! Sorry about the parallelepiped...! I'll share the final video soon. I just need to work out how to edit it in the way I want it.

What I loved about talking to maths teachers about the way they say things is that I learnt some fascinating stuff. Esther (@MrsMathematica) teaches in Belfast and she told me that they say the word 'upon' to indicate there is a bracket present. So for example they say 4(x+2) as "4 upon x + 2". And they say (x+2)(x+3) as "x + 2 upon x +3" with distinct pauses in certain places to tell you it is double brackets. I had no idea! This is so interesting.

Watch out for my videos, coming soon!

JustMaths Conference
Like last year, the JustMaths Conference was wonderfully quirky and unique. The large audience of over 200 maths teachers stayed together all day instead of going to different workshops. There were presentations from the awarding bodies, Ofqual, me, Craig Barton, and the organisers Chris and Mel. I did a short session on resources, and was rather nervous given the size of the audience.

I absolutely loved the session Graham Cumming from Edexcel did at the end of the day - he talked us through some of the contextual questions from this year's GCSE exams and shared some hilarious student tweets.

After the conference we had some time in Alton Towers. I enjoyed a very pleasant ride on the rapids with David Faram, Craig Barton and other conference delegates. I overcame my fears and queued up for the new Wicker Man ride but it broke down because of the hot weather and we gave up in the end! I'll try that one again next year.

Laden down with my heavy backpack, I finally got home shortly after midnight on Monday night. I am exhausted. Teaching today was particularly hard work!

Thank you to all the conference organisers, and to everyone who presented. I got a lot out of both conferences. Also, thanks to everyone who kept me company over the weekend! It was great to catch up with so many lovely people. Special thanks to:

• Megan Guinan for helping me out at the TweetUp where I took multitasking a step too far
• Mariana Don Bosco for being such excellent company on the train to Manchester (Pythagorean triple proofs are my new favourite thing)
• Tom Bennison for kindly filming my pronunciation videos
• Rob Smith for running the MA stand and getting me a fabulous free t shirt from the guys at Texthelp
• Craig Barton and David Faram for being my theme park buddies and forcing me to be brave!

I'm really looking forward doing a keynote at the BBO Maths Hub Secondary Conference next week. But until then, after my long weekend of conferences, I need a rest...!

5 Maths Gems #90

Welcome to my 90^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Probability Task
Thanks to John Rowe (@MrJohnRowe) for sharing this challenging probability puzzle. If you like this then you'll find similar tasks for a wide range of topics on the fantastic website openmiddle.com which I've blogged about before.

2. Exam Wrapper
Thanks to Alice Leung (@aliceleung) for sharing an exam wrapper for students to complete after an assessment. I like it that students are asked to reflect on whether they did sufficient preparation for the exam.

 3. Number Properties Puzzle

Here's a great number puzzle from @OCR_Maths.

4. A Level

If your Year 12s have internal exams coming up, you might find my revision quizzes for pure and statistics helpful. I've told my students to print off a load of these and test themselves at home until they get everything right. The statistics quiz has a huge number of definitions! 

There was a helpful discussion about A level taster lessons on Twitter this week, initiated by Adam Creen (@adamcreen). You can read the full thread here. I have found in the past that Pascal and Binomial works well. I've also used Susan Wall's lovely 'Find the coordinates' task successfully as a starter activity in A level taster lessons.

5. Euclid

Thanks to @MrsMathematica for sharing this video about Euclid - I enjoyed watching this.

Also check out The History of Non-Euclidian Geometry - Squaring the Circle and The History of Non-Euclidian Geometry - The Great Quest.

Update

In case you missed it, I recently wrote a subject knowledge post about algebraic highest common factor and lowest common multiple. Writing this made me rethink my approach to teaching this topic. 

I also published three sets of breakfast warm up resources for both Higher and Foundation GCSE. It's been lovely to see so many schools using these to calm nerves and warm up brains on the morning of exams.

I also published a set of Year 3 topics in depth packs created by Nikki Martin - please share these with primary colleagues.

There have been a number of good maths education blog posts lately that are worth reading, including:

• 'Test-Homework-Test' by Mark Horley (@mhorley) 
• 'A Mastery Curriculum in Scotland - A Review of Year 2' by Chris McGrane‏ (@ChrisMcGrane84)
• 'Simultaneous equations: an insight from playing with technology' by Tom Button (@mathstechnology)

I'm looking forward to presenting at #mathsconf15 in Manchester in two weeks - my workshop is not just an opportunity to share loads of cool indices stuff, but also to explain the principle of planning and teaching topics in depth. In a world of quick fixes, I'm going in the opposite direction... I wrote a post about this last year.

If you're coming to the conference, print a copy of my #mathsconf15 bingo in advance and play along on the day.

Finally, did you see these awesome biscuits made by Ella Dickson (@elladickson) for her Year 13 students? Amazing!

GCSE Breakfast Warm Ups: The Final Set

Following on from my previous two posts about breakfast warm up activities, I have now published the final set of resources here (Set B):

Breakfast GCSE Warm Ups - Calculator

As with the last set, there are two levels for Foundation and two levels for Higher. Each sheet contains 20 quick questions which I've not numbered so that students can work on them in any order. I hope these help students feel confident going into the exam next Tuesday.

These resources are suitable for all awarding bodies. I have designed them to be used every year for the foreseeable future - they are definitely not tailored for this year's exams. If you want to edit these resources to remove topics that have already come up in Papers 1 and 2, feel free - I have provided Word versions so you can do so.

Do keep an eye on Adam Creen's (@adamcreen) very helpful annual blog post for updates on resources specifically designed for next week's Paper 3.

Good luck! We're on the home straight now.