Happy New Year! Welcome to my 119th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. New Tasks from Don Steward
Don Steward has shared loads of new tasks in the last few months. Do check out his blog for the whole selection - here I have featured just a few examples.
In the task 'congruent parts and similar parts' the idea is to dissect the shapes into two congruent pieces with one, connected line that goes dot to dot.
The task 'frequency trees and percentages' is a great example of interleaving, as is the task 'regular polygons with algebra'.
In his post 'Introducing Angles', Don kindly shares his full set of slides introducing this topic, which include narrative and tasks.
2. Maths Kitchen
Thank you to Mr Kempson (@MrKempsonMaths) for sharing the website mathskitchen.com which helps students prepare for their GCSE exams. It's a free website designed for independent practice.
The content can be accessed without a login, but setting up an account allows students to use the progress page to find more questions on topics where they’ve made mistakes. They can also filter by level and access questions on topics they haven’t revised yet.
The site is easy to navigate. The solutions are well written (see example below) and there are videos to support students who get stuck.
Thank you to Anouk de Vos (@NookiedV) who shared the website alevelmathsrevision.com where A level Maths and Further Maths questions (predominantly OCR and Edexcel) and mark schemes have been organised by topic.
Eddie Woo (@misterwootube) recently listened to Craig Barton's podcast with Emma Mccrea. In it Emma shares a framework which can be used to modulate the difficulty of a mathematical task. Eddie made this fantastic sketchnote to summarise the key points:
John Corbett (@Corbettmaths) has launched a new set of Level 2 Further Maths 5-a-day questions.
He'll be adding lots more in January, along with a set of revision cards.
Update
I'm really pleased that people are finding my book useful. Here are two blog post reviews:
- Musings: A Compendium of Mathematical Methods by Jo Morgan - this post is written by Lisa (@Elsie2110). It's really helpful to read a review from a primary teacher's perspective.
- Let’s talk about methods (Part 1) - this post is written by Sudeep from Boss Maths (@boss_maths). It includes his thoughts on method selection, plus a fun method for finding the nth term of a quadratic sequence.
It's also nice to know that people have enjoyed listening to me and Craig Barton talking about teaching indices. I blogged about it here.
If you are interested in learning a bit about how middle / high school teachers think about teaching math, this conversation with @mathsjem is absolutely terrific. https://t.co/Up2CX95RJY— Mike Lawler (@mikeandallie) December 28, 2019
Do have a read of the latest MA eNewsletter which was published last week. At the MA we are very excited about two things: the launch of our revamped Mathematics in School journal, and the flurry of bookings for our upcoming Easter conference. I get the impression that people like our new accessible pricing structure and our brilliant conference programme. It's going to be great!
Last night I enjoyed a delightful evening at Dr Frost's triannual maths drinks. I particularly enjoyed the impromptu midnight game of charades! Thank you to Jamie for hosting. It was lovely to catch up with so many friends. Jamie has been hosting these drinks in the school holidays for a couple of years now. This was the biggest turnout yet with over 20 of us in attendance. It's an open invite so do keep an eye on Twitter if you want to come to the next one.
I'm back to school on Monday, right on time for my 39th birthday... This is one of the things I miss about my previous career - I always waited until after my birthday to return to work, but I can't do that any more!
I look forward to seeing people at BrewEd Maths in Croydon next week. I'll have a few copies of my book with me in case anyone wants to buy one!
I'll leave you with this great problem which was created by Jonathan Hall (@studymaths).
— Jonathan Hall (@StudyMaths) December 23, 2019
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