I made this video for Rising Academy Network teachers to show them how I teach my classes to roll numbers.
I’ve come to the conclusion that ace teachers are experts in classroom culture and that the most effective maths teachers are also excellent at modelling and questioning. With the hope of getting some feedback in the comments, here’s what I…
My interest in Shanghai maths teaching is an intellectual matter not a political one. We should definitely be wanting to know more about their pedagogy given we are rarely in a position in our busy, chaotic, highly emotional school lives…
This comment was left on the Design your own mastery curriculum article and deserves its own post. Centering on the what of early mathematical schooling, Helen talks about the emergency, reactive shortcuts that end up being used as a result…
This post is dedicated to the wonderful City Year volunteers who tirelessly dedicated themselves to the pupils of King Solomon Academy, four days a week for a whole year. In response to tonight’s #mathscpdchat, I’ve written down my thoughts on…
Long before the Education Endowment Foundation’s Toolkit found that peer tutoring can add 6 more months of learning progress, I faced a problem that only peer tutoring could solve. All keystage 3 classes at King Solomon Academy are taught in…
Notoriously difficult for pupils to understand, I think addition and subtraction of negatives is one of the things that one comes to understand after doing lots of practice. HOWEVER, that practice needs to be yielding correct answers from the off.…
There seems to be a current surge from Heads of Maths and KS3 Maths Coordinators looking to adopt more of a mastery approach to teaching maths. This post is a quick run through of the journey the curriculum at King…
Dear Head of Maths, You are invited to spend a day visiting King Solomon Academy on Friday 21st March, when you will have the chance to observe maths lessons and daily life, discuss the department-level things on your mind and…
Towards the end of last school year (2012-13), the great members of the KSA maths department did an analysis of the topics coming up in the first 50 marks in GCSE maths higher papers. We looked through a stack of…
Dear Head of Maths, You are invited to visit King Solomon Academy on Friday 13th December. The agenda is as follows: 7.45am – Arrive 8am – Auction 8.40am – Briefing from Bruno 8.50am – Lesson observations – A mix of…
The following is an extract of the text I wrote for an ebook aimed as a guide for first year TeachFirst maths teachers. The excerpt covers what I see as the major difficulty of grasping fractions – their multiple personalities.…
In my class I run a simple pupil-checking-pupil-work system. Pupil A completes work and puts hand up in shape of letter V (for ‘validate’). Specific training beforehand as to which fingers to use! Teacher, wearing Validator sign on the end…
When we started blended learning, life was good. My pupils began studying more independently and their work rate went up but it didn’t take me long to realise there was something missing to sustain their productivity – they needed their…
To celebrate World Maths Day today, we decided to set a world record for the largest number of people rolling numbers! We had the year 3s, 4s, 5s, 7s, 8s and a handful of year 9s plus staff and visitors…
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in the class could recall a multiplication fact up to 12 × 12 in less than 3 seconds? That’s my goal and I’ve nearly accomplished it for the third year in a row. It…
Today we threw paper aeroplanes in my year 7 lessons and it was a lot of fun! Underlying all the fun, however, was a serious competition and competitions must have winners. To win fairly you probably need to throw more…
[embedplusvideo height=”253″ width=”400″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/uykOrQvC4Mw?fs=1&hd=1″ vars=”ytid=uykOrQvC4Mw&width=400&height=253&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=1&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3804″ /] I am a teacher in the KSA Maths Department and I have just finished 2 weeks on Circle Theorems with my year 10 class. One of the philosophies of the KSA Maths department…
Once upon a time there was a king who lived in a castle on an island in the middle of a spectacular blue lake. So starts a ‘true story’ I invented to mask the introduction of a new maths topic.…
[embedplusvideo height=”241″ width=”380″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/AcYTz19HduU?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=AcYTz19HduU&width=380&height=241&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3438″ /] Today I had the pleasure of visiting one of the reknowned Rocketship schools. They were incredibly hospitable, the pupils were working hard, and the instructors answered all my hundreds of questions. Thanks to…
[embedplusvideo height=”241″ width=”380″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5mqih8pl264?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=5mqih8pl264&width=380&height=241&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep7192″ /] A couple of colleagues* and I have been fortunate enough to spend the last few days in New Orleans at the Virtual Schools Symposium – yes, we have very supportive line managers! While…
On the back of my Time-Shifted Teaching trial last year, we’re going ahead with a larger scale pilot of blended learning this year. I found that there were a number of barriers to time-shifted teaching, including pupils’ access to computers…
At KSA, we teach maths in mixed ability groups all the way through Keystage 3 (ages 11-14) and I now think it’s one of the smartest decisions we ever made. When I was appointed Head of Maths, before the school…
I enjoyed my year 7 lessons today and thought I’d share some photos and the resources. You can see blocks, an abacus, a card arrangement task, a ‘washing line’ and pupils making a number up at the front. Resources are…
My name is Sam and I am part of the King Solomon Academy Maths department. Bruno has asked us to write on his blog about an area of personal development in maths teaching. As part of the team I get…
Well, there’s an email I didn’t think I’d ever receive. Who could it be and why were they here to see me and not the headteacher? It can be strange what goes through my head. “I’m too young to meet…
I was in a training session today that gave me such a revelation. One of those I-see-the-world-in-a-different-way-now moments – that’s how much it rocked my world. The trainer, Carly Biggam from ARK, set us up in groups of three: one…
Here’s how I see it, it’s easier to learn from the maths mistakes of others than from your own. Probably because there’s an emotional association with making a mistake, I find pupils jump at the chance to dissect and discuss…
We know that physical and visual cues can help learners – objects such as tokens, cards, Dienes blocks, Cuisinaire rods, tiles, straws, beakers, multi-link cubes, string, Lego men (!) or loads of other props are great for the pupils to…
At KSA we practise times tables through rolling numbers (call-and-response chanting the times tables while counting off on our fingers as we go). The physical movement combined with the catchy chants help to energise the class, give us the chance…
If you have a Promethean interactive whiteboard at your school, the chances are you will have ActivInspire installed on the teacher computers too. It’s the software you use for building and teaching lessons with tools for drawing shapes, handwriting, placing…
[embedplusvideo height=”196″ width=”300″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4A9F3AwQrZk?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=4A9F3AwQrZk&width=300&height=196&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep9402″ /] The Pencil Pledge is a short chant we do to get fired up before getting on with independent work. These are the words: Teacher: Pencils ready! Class: [Bang table with pencil 2 times…