5 Maths Gems #150

Welcome to my 150^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers. 

1. Tasks

I've spotted several great tasks on Twitter recently. Here are three of them:

@TickTockMaths shared an introduction to bounds calculations.

@canning_mrmaths shared a trigonometry task, based on an idea by @DanielPearcy.

 

@jontheteacher shared some tasks designed to introduce the concept of 'like' terms. 

2. Mrdaymaths.com

@nathanday314 shares fantastic resources on Twitter so it's great to see that he's launched a website where we can find them all in one place. Check out mrdaymaths.com to download his displays, tasks, resources and presentations. 

Nathan always has great ideas and presents them beautifully. For example, in this thread he explains how he designed a sequence of lessons that took Year 7 from substitution through to solving equations. The resources featured in this thread are available to download from his website.

I also love Nathan's 'No More Primes' game. Read his post to see how it works.

3. Angles and Ratios Interweaved

Thanks to @blatherwick_sam for sharing a lovely couple of tasks interweaving ratios and angles.

4. Quadratics Questions
I love these clever quadratics questions from @boss_maths. 

5. QLA Workbook Generator
@PiXLMattTheApp is always sharing free tools and resources for maths teachers. His latest is an online tool which allows you to create a student workbook from a QLA. 

I recommend that you watch Matt's video if you want to find out more about how this works.

 
Update
Over half-term (which feels like months ago!) I wrote three blog posts:

• Thinking about Misconceptions
• 5 Maths Gems #149
• Curriculum Sequencing

I also updated my conferences page which lists national maths education conferences. Please let me know of any additional events that I should add to this page.

Note that the MA Annual Conference is now open for booking. I'm one of the keynote speakers at this conference and am really looking forward to it.

Speaking of the MA, did you see that they have made the latest issue of their journal Mathematics in School freely available to read online? I'm a big fan of this journal and always look forward to receiving my copy in the post.

It was a busy week for me at work last week. One of my big responsibilities is to run the Key Stage 4 Options process. I launched it last week, running events for both parents and students. At the same time, my school was treated to a MAT review (basically a Mocksted, though we're not meant to call it that...). This was stressful, mainly because we're all 100% sure that our school is outstanding - in every sense of the word - and we really wanted to make sure that the inspectors saw that. The entire maths department made me immensely proud, as did my Year 9 class (I was observed teaching them some experimental ideas that I picked up at the last mathsconf... It was a bit risky for me to go ahead with that lesson but thankfully it went well! Phew).

Milestones
This is a milestone blog post for me. When I wrote my 50th gems post I was presented with a special cake at a conference (thanks Julia et al!). When I wrote my 100th gems post I recorded a special podcast with Craig Barton, and Chris Smith sent me a trophy which I still proudly display on my bookcase. Today I've reached 150 gems posts. Have you read them all?! You should! There's a gems index here. 

By the way, I know people love the gems posts, which are packed full of other people's great ideas, but I do also blog about my own ideas too! In fact I've written 274 posts which aren't gems posts, and the full archive is here.

Another milestone I recently passed (but failed to notice at the time!) was my ten millionth website visit. Thank you to all my readers for their support. I am immensely happy that my resource libraries save people time, and that my blog posts provide teachers with inspiration and ideas. Teachers who visit resourceaholic.com tend to do so on a regular basis, so I must be doing something right.

Finally, a personal milestone for me - my eldest daughter turned ten. A decade of parenting. 💖

I'll leave you with this tweet which made me laugh. I wonder what my students would write down if I asked them the same question.

On yesterday's quiz, just for fun, I ended with the request "in the spirit of Halloween, show the scariest math mistake you can." I wasn't disappointed by some of the student responses! pic.twitter.com/LV50BpE1us

— Chris Luzniak (@cluzniak) October 27, 2021