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...

5 Maths Gems #69

Welcome to my 69^th update from the world of Maths EduTwitter. This is where I share some of the latest ideas and resources for teaching maths.

1. New Diagnostic Questions Collections 
I use diagnosticquestions.com every week to create multiple choice quizzes for my classes. I particularly like the questions provided by AQA, OCR and Edexcel. Recently I've also been making use of the new questions provided by White Rose Maths Hub. These are designed for primary students but have worked well with my Year 7s.

I'm pleased to see that new themed collections from the UK Mathematics Trust will available soon. These will be helpful for both stretch and challenge in lessons and for UKMT maths challenge preparation.

2. Don's Blogs
I've written about Don Steward's resources many times. He is one of my favourite maths resource authors. His main blog donsteward.blogspot.co.uk is packed full of wonderful rich tasks for a wide range of topics. Don has a few other blogs that are also well worth exploring:

• Median practice and quiz questions - There are loads of great resources here including mutiple choice quizzes, odd one out activities and revision exercises.

• Median magic squares - I'm a big fan of using magic squares in maths lessons! This blog has magic squares for numerous topics ranging from straightforward to complex. They work well for both fluency development (eg fraction addition and negative numbers) and stretch and challenge.

• Median practice makes perfect - This is Don's newest blog. It contains lots of excellent questions that can be used for classwork or homework. Examples include exercises for long multiplication, powers, decimal addition and angles in polygons.

Don also has a blog 'core pure 3 notes' with lovely clear slides and questions for A level and 'MEDIAN + ICT choices' where he shares lots of excellent websites and technologies.

Follow @Team_Maths1 on Twitter for regular updates of Don Steward's latest resources (this is just me on another account!).

3. Arrays
Ed Southall (@solvemymaths) made another video! This one is on multiplication arrays.



If you missed Ed's excellent polygons video, check out Gems 67.

4. Breaking Down the Big Questions
Thanks to Mr Chadburn (@mrchadburn) for sharing an interesting new resource idea. Some of the bigger GCSE questions require a number of different strands of knowledge and skill. He breaks these big questions down into these strands and has students practise each strand separately before bringing it all together to address the bigger problem. Mr Chadburn has blogged about this and shared two resources here.

There are lots of GCSE questions that would work well with this approach - this challenging question from a Churchill Maths paper is a good example.

I think this idea might work well at A level too.

5. crashMATHS
Website crashmaths.com shares GCSE and A level practice papers which are well worth a look. Through their Twitter account (@crashMATHS_CM) they will be sharing daily questions in the run up to GCSE exams.

Update

It's been a busy few weeks. I've been doing some work for TES, helping to build topic-specific pages of recommended free resources - I will share these pages when they are published. Whilst doing this work I discovered that the new GCSE topic 'area under a graph' was rather under-resourced, so I created a couple of new resources: area under a graph and exam questions. They're nothing special but hopefully fill a gap.

I've also been busy adding lots of excellent new resource links to my resource libraries.

Did you catch my latest post? I wrote an article for teachwire.net about maths clubs for both primary and secondary schools.

My school is advertising two roles for a September 2017 start: Maths Teacher and Lead Practitioner. It's a great school and the members of the maths faculty are really lovely so if you live in Surrey or South London and you fancy trying something new, do get in touch. I'm happy to answer any questions if you're unsure about applying - email me at resourceaholic@gmail.com.

I hope to see lots of you at #mathsconf9 in Bristol next month. There are some fantastic workshops lined up. Most people are staying at the Travel Lodge - there will be a free shuttle bus from the hotel to the conference on the Saturday morning. If you're staying over, join us for drinks on the Friday night! Details to follow.

I'll leave you with this lovely map of mathematics by @DominicWalliman - thank you to @Mathematical_A for sharing this.

Going Well...

I'm struggling with workload at the moment but I'm taking a quick break from the marking and UCAS references to share three things that are going really well this year.

1. Low Stakes Quizzes 

I started doing regular multiple choice quizzes with my Year 10s last year and instantly loved it (I wrote about it here). I've never done anything before that's given me so much insight into my students' understanding and the effectiveness of my teaching. My Year 10s ended up being taken by a PGCE student for a significant part of the year so the quizzes stopped, but I have reintroduced them this year with the same class (now Year 11) and again I'm reminded of how awesome these quizzes are.

My weekly quizzes take 20 minutes to run in the lesson (we do it every Friday), plus about 20 minutes to mark after the lesson. The quizzes don't take long to make when I'm planning my lessons - lately I've just been using the snipping tool to take questions from Diagnostic Questions (shhh, don't tell Craig!). You can view my quizzes here.

I give each student a grade (A, B or Not Yet) and anyone who scores 100% gets a sticker (they love that!). The quizzes are open book so there's no stress for students - in fact they love them (I get a cheer when I say it's time for the quiz!) and they are always excited to see their score in the next lesson. For me 'it's like I'm looking at the freaking Matrix' (in the words of Nathan Kraft in this post about vertical whiteboards!). Seriously, this is one of the best things I've ever done.

2. Folders
My Year 11s now use ring binders instead of exercise books. It's brilliant. I need to write a separate post about how this works because there's lots to say. Loads of people told me it wouldn't work, mainly because the folders would quickly become disorganised (which may still happen - we're only three weeks in), but I've designed a good set of resources that minimise the risk of messy folders. I'm pretty confident that it will continue to work well. Watch out for a post about this!

3. Times Table Rock Stars
I'm not sure I'm allowed to put photos of my students on my blog, but if I could then you'd see the happy faces of my Year 7s absolutely loving Times Tables Rock Stars (whilst wearing wigs and sunglasses!). All Year 7 teachers at Glyn now have one lesson in an IT Room every fortnight to run a Times Tables Rock Stars lesson. I do the paper version with my class too, plus I've just launched an after school 'Rock Gods' club for keen Year 7s. A number of teachers have also set up other classes (Year 8 to Year 10) and it seems to be going well all round. My students happily sit there for a full hour enthusiastically practising times tables, and I get to listen to rock music so it's win-win...!

So that's three things are going particularly well for me this year. Are you trying anything new that seems to be working? Please tweet me or comment below.

5 Maths Gems #47

Hello and welcome to my 47^th gems post. This is where I share five maths teaching ideas I've seen on Twitter.

1. Don's Multiple Choice
I often write about Don Steward's resources - it's worth checking his blog every now and then to see what he's added. This week I was browsing his 'practice and quiz questions' blog (which is separate to his main blog) when I noticed that he has started to produce excellent sets of multiple choice questions - here's an example:

 He has also produced some lovely 'odd one out' activities:

Both types of activity would work with technologies such as Plickers or Quick Key. Multiple choice questions are making a bit of a comeback at the moment - for more sources, see my post 'Multiple Choice Questions'.

2. Inequality Question
I really like this question from Steve Blades (@m4thsdotcom). Ask your students for the minimum and maximum value of abc to check their understanding of inequalities and integers.

I'll use this with my Year 11s - many of them struggled with the question below in their mock GCSE, which suggests a lack of fundamental understanding of inequality symbols. 

3. Math Wall of Shame

Thanks to Megan Schmidt (@Veganmathbeagle) for sharing Sara VanDerWerf's post 'Math Wall of Shame'. This post provides over 80 pictures including dodgy graphs and incorrect pricing - these are good for inspiring class discussion. Here's a couple of examples:

'Here's a cent, keep the change' 

4. Quick Cover 

Mathsbox is a fantastic website and it's very affordable at only £48 per year. It is full of useful resources and the recently added 'Quick Cover' lessons are a particularly good idea. These are designed for teachers to set as cover when they will be absent from a lesson. They include clear examples, plenty of practice questions and a jigsaw activity. Here's a couple of samples:

• Simplifying
• Expanding brackets

There's currently 23 Quick Cover lessons and the collection is growing. 

5. Access Maths

Access Maths is another excellent website with a wide range of worksheets, games and activities to explore. A new set of resources has just been added: Starters and Progress Tests for the new GCSE. 

Update
My post Five things you might not know about the new GCSE content #1 was well received. I promised a second post with five more facts about the new GCSE... I'm working on it but I think I've found some discrepancies between exam boards that I'm investigating. Watch this space!

There's been two announcements since my last gems post that you might be interested in. The first is that the date and venue has been set for researchED Maths and Science. It's on Saturday 11th June in Oxford. I think this will be a fantastic event. I have to attend a wedding reception in Kent that evening so I'll have to leave early, but will definitely be there in the morning. Tickets are likely to sell out quickly.

The second announcement was regarding new tests for times tables. We all agree that fluency in times tables is vital (as is conceptual understanding of multiplication) but there is disagreement over whether more Key Stage 2 tests are desirable.

It's also worth noting another change regarding testing (see above) - from 2017 Year 7 maths teachers will have three months to 'fix' students who did not 'pass' Key Stage 2...

It's been a hectic first week back at school but thankfully this weekend I didn't have any marking to do so I had the opportunity to visit the excellent Escher exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It finishes on 17th January so if you want to go then get tickets now! The gallery shop is full of mathsy gifts too.

I'll leave you with a nice demonstration of Pythagoras' Theorem from mathwarehouse.com.

Some Things I've Tried

The last eight weeks have been the busiest I've ever experienced. There's been lots of factors at play to make this period particularly exhausting, both at school and at home - it doesn't help that my 17 month old daughter still doesn't sleep at night! A break is much needed. Half term also provides a good opportunity to reflect on some new things I've tried this term.

Source: The Guardian/ Ros Asquith

1. Famous Five
This is an idea from @mccreaemma which I featured in Gems 35. It works like this:

1. Before each Year 10 lesson, I write the words 'Famous Five' on the board.
2. As my students arrive I have a starter activity ready for them. 
3. Under the title Famous Five, I write the names of the first five students to settle down and start working. They LOVE being on this list! It's getting harder to choose the Famous Five because they've all responded so well to this.
4. At the end of the lesson I say, "If you're on today's Famous Five list you can leave now, the rest of you pack up and stand behind your chairs quietly". The Famous Five dash out of the room.

The funny thing is that some of these students have registration in the same room immediately after my lesson, so they have nowhere to rush off to! They just like the glory of being Famous Five. 

This has been a really successful initiative to minimise faff at the beginning of my lessons. Also, because it's a bit different to what they're used to, it has helped me build a good relationship with this class. Huge thanks to Emma Mccrea for sharing the idea - do read her original post to see how it works for her.

2. Assessment 

I've been doing fortnightly quizzes with my Year 10 class since the start of this term. These are open book tests covering the key skills learnt in the preceding fortnight. To make these quizzes I draw on a variety of sources and keep the format consistent - each quiz is 15 minutes long and consists of 12 multiple choice questions.

These quizzes have quickly become an established routine. Most students take full advantage of the 'open book' rule - during the test I see them looking back through their exercise books at notes and examples. This encourages good note taking during lessons.

I grade the quizzes A, B or Not Yet (inspired by this post from Sarah Hagan). If a student receives a 'Not Yet' then they haven't demonstrating sufficient understanding of the topic so they have to take another quiz after school the following week. Of course there has to be remedial action between receiving a 'Not Yet' and resitting the quiz - these students either see me for help after lessons, or I send them links to Corbett Maths or Hegarty Maths videos.

My first quiz resulted in 13 Not Yets and only 8 As. A worrying number of students couldn't multiply decimals so I taught the topic to the whole class again using a different approach. The results were much improved in the retake.

These quizzes only take about 30 minutes to mark - in those 30 minutes I gain a valuable insight into my students' understanding. I hope that these regular low stakes quizzes will encourage my students to remain focused, take good notes and seek support. Do read Kris Boulton's post 'How tests teach and motivate' which inspired me to start doing these quizzes. So far it's been a great success.

3. Modelling Good Work 

Every classroom in my department has a visualiser. Unfortunately none of them seem to work (probably due to recent software updates) so this foiled my plan to utilise visualisers this year to show examples of student work. Instead, I take photos of good work while I'm marking. There's no point in telling students that they should set their work out better without giving examples.

I've been trying this out with my Year 12 class. They're studying S1 and we've been working on summarising data (eg mean and standard deviation of continuous data). It's easy to make accuracy slips in these calculations and students who fail to show clear workings in exams could end up scoring no method marks.

The picture below is an example of a student's answer to a standard deviation question - I showed this photo to the class when I returned their most recent homework. Few students in this class had received full marks for this question.

It's not perfect, but this student has definitely got the right idea. He's drawn out the whole table clearly and written down the formula for standard deviation. He's shown intermediate steps and his workings are very easy to follow. If only all my students set their work out like this - the worst examples were those who tried to squeeze their workings into the margin of the question paper ('Fermat-style' workings). I hope that by showing good examples to the class, the quality of work will improve. I'll report back on this later in the year!

4. Communication
At my previous school the only direct communication I had with parents was on Parents Evening. I never called, emailed or met with parents. At my new school every teacher recognises the importance of engaging parents and this is done very effectively across the school. I decided to engage the parents of my Year 10 students by way of an introductory email at the start of term, followed by half-termly newsletters. Here's my first newsletter:

I've included an update on what we've been studying, praise for students who've done particularly well, information about membership of the Society of Young Mathematicians and more.

I'd been planning to do a newsletter like this for years so I'm glad I finally did it. I found this MathedUp post encouraging - it includes a lovely example of a newsletter produced by Mo Ladak which is worth a look.

As Jim Riley (@tutor2u) said when I shared my newsletter on Twitter, "Most parents might not care - but if just one or two do, it is all worthwhile".

So that's it - four ideas that seem to be working well. I'll blog again later this year to update you on whether these initiatives continue to be effective. Thanks for reading!

Multiple Choice Questions

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) have always been popular in maths in some parts of the world. In recent years they have gained popularity in England and Wales, and are now commonly used as a diagnostic tool in the classroom. MCQs are also now a key feature of AQA's GCSE papers.

Some teachers have been asking where they can find MCQs that are aligned with our curriculum. I've listed some sources below - if you have anything to add, please email me.

1. Foundation and Higher GCSE Multiple Choice Questions by Topic
Suitable for Key Stage 3 and 4.
I found these multiple choice quizzes at work - I believe they were written by Julie Bolter, probably to accompany a textbook. There are quizzes for a number of topics including sequences, standard form and coordinates.

2. Foundation and Higher GCSE Multiple Choice Revision Questions
Suitable for Key Stage 3 and 4.
There's a large selection of multiple choice questions here, both in PowerPoint and Word. The topics are mixed so these would be useful for exam revision or retrieval practice. Thanks to Mitesh Patel for sending me these. We don't know the original source so please tweet or email me if you know.

3. Diagnostic Questions
Suitable for Key Stages 1 - 5.
This fantastic website from Craig Barton has a huge range of multiple choice questions, contributed by users. You can quickly create quizzes for use with mini-whiteboards, voting cards or Plickers. The most powerful aspect of this website is the opportunity to set students quizzes online - this allows teachers to read explanations and therefore analyse students' thinking.

It's worth checking out the ready made quiz collections including quizzes from White Rose, UKMT, Edexcel, AQA and OCR.

Grace Horne, who is Head of Maths at Kettering Science Academy, has sent me her amazing set of multiple choice quizzes. She's made 85 consistently formatted quizzes, each containing five questions drawn from diagnosticquestions.com. Quizzes are categorised by topic and GCSE tier. Answers are provided. This is a very helpful resource! Huge thanks to Grace for sharing this.

4. SQA
Suitable for Key Stage 5.

The Scottish Qualifications Authority used to set Objective Tests for Higher Mathematics. These contain lovely questions for Year 12 and 13, covering topics such as calculus, trigonometry, sequences, vectors and the equation of a circle. Thanks to Helen Dey for telling me about these. Thanks also to @mrallanmaths for sharing this editable bank of Objective Test questions.

5. Integral

Suitable for Key Stage 5.
MEI provides a great selection of multiple choice tests for A level Maths and Further Maths on Integral (school login required). The example below is from a Normal Distribution assessment for Edexcel S1.

6. 30 Number Starters
Suitable for Key Stage 3 and 4.
Ben Cooper (@bcoops_online) on TES provides a PowerPoint of 30 multiple choice quizzes for various number topics including fractions, decimals and percentages. 

7. Functional MCQs
Suitable for Key Stage 2 and 3.
Thanks to Jon Treby for this set of Functional Multiple Choice Questions. They are split by topic and all questions are contextual.

8. Foundation of Advanced Mathematics 

Suitable for Key Stage 4.

Stuart Price (@sxpmaths) wrote a post about using multiple choice questions from Foundation of Advanced Mathematics exams for Year 10 revision competitions. There's a number of past papers to draw questions from - most of the topics are from GCSE and the questions are suitable for extension in Year 10 and 11.

There's lots to explore here! If I've missed anything, please email it to resourceaholic@gmail.com. Thank you!