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…
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…
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…
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…
In my year 7 classes at the start of every year, it’s a sad truth that not all of them know their times tables off by heart. By not having this basic building block, problem-solving later on in maths is…
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…
We’ve just run a school-wide competition for the best animated mini maths lessons. Pairs of pupils composed short animations (using www.xtranormal.com*) on a maths objective of their choice. The animation had to meet the following criteria: It had explain a…
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…
One of my memories of having fun learning maths was being shown how to control a ‘turtle’ so that it traced a path of my choosing across the computer screen. Maybe because I got to be the boss of…
[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…