5 Maths Gems #148

Welcome to my 148^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers. 

1. Distance Time Game

Thank you to @MrChapmanMaths for sharing this Graph Game from @davidwees. Best played on a computer (not a phone), this game is absolutely brilliant for developing understanding of distance-time graphs. It's really fun.

This reminds me of an activity I did on my PGCE where we walked/ran across a room trying to track distance time graphs. That was fun too, but required specialist equipment that I haven't seen since. 

The Graph Game led me to more content from David (listed here) including this excellent Factors Game. I played this with my daughter and we were quickly deep in discussion about factors and primes, and practising division. What a great game!

2. MCQ Generator
@mrshawthorne7 has created a dynamic multiple choice question generator. Select a topic and it generates random questions that can be used to identify and diagnose misconceptions. You can choose to hide the choices initially, to encourage students to do some thinking before they see the possible answers.

3. Percentages Task

I like this task shared by @MrsEVCartwright. Students are shown the working, and have to work out what the question might have been. 

4. Factorising Task

Here's another nice task, this time from @canning_mrmaths. It's an Open Middle task on factorising quadratics.

5. Probability Spinners

I recently presented a CPD session on probability where I talked about how spinners make an excellent fuss-free teaching tool. Following on from this, the team at MathsPad have created a Probability Spinners Interactive Tool which is free to use. It has sections on finding probabilities as fractions, decimals or percentages, expectations of frequency of outcomes after a given number of spins, and the results of repeated trials, including a bar chart representation and a relative frequency table. 

Subscribers can also access a Probability Trees - Spinners Interactive Tool. MathsPad's interactive tools are always excellent - you can see their full collection here. 

It's also great to see that MathsPad's new range of curriculum booklets is expanding, with the recent addition of an Expressions booklet for Year 8.

Update
My last blog post about resource design went down well. If you missed it, you can catch up here.

I recently recorded a podcast with Craig Barton where we chatted about teaching for depth and curriculum design. You can listen here.

I've spent the last week dealing with hundreds of access requests for the resources I store on Google Drive. This is because Google did a security update which broke all my links (thanks Google!). Links have to be fixed individually unfortunately - every evening I come home from work to find dozens of emails from people trying to access resources, at which point I fix those particular links. I have a feeling this is going to continue for months until they are all fixed! Apologies if you click on a broken link on my blog at any point. I'm working on it!

Are you going to the upcoming maths conference? I'm really looking forward to an in-person conference. It will be good to catch up with everyone. It's happening on 16th October in Kent and you can get a ticket here. I'll be speaking about curriculum sequencing in Period 4. 

Here are a few other things you might have missed:

• @jemmaths published a video 'Line Managing the Mathematics Department' which is highly recommended if you're a Head of Maths.
• @andyparkinson31 has indexed five hundred Numberphile videos by curriculum area and shared this resource on TES.
• The NCETM published an excellent set of subject knowledge audits which will be incredibly helpful for ITE providers.

Last week saw the launch of the DfE's Key Stage 3 Maths Guidance, which was written by the secondary team at the NCETM. This guidance suggests an ordering of the Key Stage 3 curriculum. I was surprised to see this! It links closely with the workshop on curriculum sequencing I'm running at mathsconf in two weeks.

The guidance provides valuable material which can be used in department meetings to help teachers prepare to teach each topic on the curriculum. For each area of maths, there are sections exemplifying the key mathematical ideas. These sections feature information on the common difficulties and misconceptions and suggest questioning and other strategies for teachers to use.

My school held Open Morning yesterday. Limited tickets plus a very clever one-way self-guided tour worked really well to eliminate any crowding. I am fortunate to work with a brilliant team of mathematicians - they are pictured below (shout out to Mariam who was off sick so missed the photo!). We will have Year 11 for the first time next year and we'll be recruiting. If you want to join our team, look out for a job advert in the Spring Term. 

I'll leave you with this units meme from Reddit which I first saw shared by @MrYoungMaths. I showed my Year 9s, who looked at me with blank faces while I chuckled away...