5 Maths Gems #191

Welcome to my 191^st gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Building Blocks
There are loads of resources available for teaching high attainers but relatively few resources that are specifically designed for teaching secondary school students who find maths very difficult. 

MathsPad is already one of the best sources of tasks for students who need extra scaffolding - their curriculum booklets come in two levels: core and support. But for those students who find the support resources too challenging, I'm delighted to see that MathsPad have started a new series of booklets called Building Blocks. These are designed for secondary teachers to use with students who need additional support to address key gaps in foundational knowledge. The first Building Blocks booklet is now available to MathsPad subscribers and includes topics such as 2D shapes, place value, number bonds and even numbers. Here are a couple of extracts:

2. Dr Austin

Lots of new resources have been published on draustinmaths.com since my last Gems post in May. Examples include a Reading bar charts match-up and Frequency tables and bar charts fill in the blanks.

There are also some Further Maths A Level resources covering Sums of Series and Roots of Polynomials

Thank you Amanda!

3. Recurring Decimals

Catriona Agg posted about a lovely Don Steward task on recurring decimals. I've never used this task before because it contains fractional indices which I don't teach until Year 10 (I teach recurring decimals in Year 9) but she reformatted the task to remove the fractional indices. As is often the case with Don's tasks, there's a lovely pattern in the answers.

4. AS Level Statistics

Last term I used some of the excellent resources from the 1st Class Maths A Level Page. These are really high quality and incredibly useful. 

I've added all of these to my A level resource library. 

5. Reasoning with Quadratics

I like this Quadratics Always Sometimes Never task from Nathan Day. Thanks for sharing Nathan! 

Update

As it's the summer holidays and I've had (slightly) less school work to do, I finally got round to making a GCSE Statistics Resource Library - read more about this in my previous blog post. 

In July I had a wonderful day celebrating the end of term with my lovely team. We said goodbye to Hang - he's been at my school for five years and is now off to teach in Malaysia. We will really miss him - he's a legend! I'm excited to welcome three new maths teachers to my team in September.

Next week I have my school's first A level results day (we opened seven years ago so this is our first Year 13 cohort). I'm rather nervous about this! I feel particularly uneasy because unfortunately we use Edexcel at A level which means we've been affected by the issues with their papers - read more here in this very detailed and helpful account of what has happened. 

I'm looking forward to #mathsconf39 which is taking place in St John's Wood in London on 11th October. I have a policy of never repeating the same mathsconf workshop twice so I need to write a new presentation for this one but don't have any big ideas - get in touch if there's something specific you'd like me to present about. Unusually, I won't be staying in a hotel on the Friday night for this conference so won't be at pre-conference drinks, but I will be around for post-conference drinks on the Saturday night if anyone is up for it - all welcome! 

If you enjoyed this Gems post and you have some spare time over the summer holidays to look for maths teaching inspiration, you can find another 190 Gems posts here! 

Thanks for reading - enjoy the rest of your summer break.