I made this video for Rising Academy Network teachers to show them how I teach my classes to roll numbers.
In my first lesson with a new class I have two things I want to achieve: visioneering and routineering. This post is about visioneering, the act of sharing the Big Vision with your students and imbuing them with a Sense…
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…
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…
Pre-reading: Strategies for learning, remembering and understanding the times tables. Some additional thoughts for starting out teaching the times tables with year 2s onwards, prompted by a #MathsCPDChat These are the things I think are important for mastery of the…
Update: the 2014 GCSE results have put us in the top 10 in the country for 5 A*-C inc EM. Excerpt of an article written by Max Haimendorf, the headteacher with whom I and a small group of teachers founded…
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.…
Good luck Just wanting to wish pupils sitting their GCSE maths exams in the next couple of weeks, the best of luck. I remember what it feels like to be revising hard at this stage and the exam nerves on…
Plan 50 is the name I’m giving to a drive for each of my year 11 pupils to gain an additional 50 marks in their final mock exam in March compared to one they’ve just done in November. The list…
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…
I handed out a mail-merged letter to my year 11 class today, based on their performance in a maths mock exam we held a week ago. This is how it read: Monday 2nd December, Dear R………., In the maths mock…
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.” – Bertrand Russell Spoiler alert: This video was made by two amazing artists, Yann Pineill and…
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.…
Background The Head of PE (Nic Christo) asked me if we could do some cross-curricular work in maths lessons that linked to the upcoming sports day. To keep the buzz of sports day going, Nic wanted English, Maths and Science…
Related links Times Tables Rock Stars Strategies for learning, understanding and remembering the times tables
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…
[slideshow_deploy id=’1177′] Some are poundlandtastic others are simply worth paying the extra for.
[embedplusvideo height=”224″ width=”350″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/dU1xS07N-FA?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=dU1xS07N-FA&width=350&height=224&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3894″ /] The short version of this short film has more than 10m views on YouTube Forget English, French and Spanish. Forget Arabic and Chinese. The language our pupils really need to know is computer…
[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.…
You can display them on the screen or print them back to back. Every second page is the ‘answer’ or flipside to the odd numbered pages. Hope that makes sense! e.g. on one side it might show a shape and…
[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…
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…
Trying to picture 3D shapes in your head and ‘spin’ them round for a different view is hard enough for many people. Which is why asking pupils to visualise 3D coordinates from a 2D representation, let alone perform any calculations…
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…
A while back I wrote about using LOGO as entry route for pupils into programming. I guess many of you have been thinking of ways of doing the same. One very clever teacher based in Canada, has taken some Google…
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…
I’m writing this article in response to a Blog Initiation Drive organised by all the good guys in the maths edublogging jungle. It’s not just my first week back, it’s also my pupils’ first week at secondary school. For the…