Month: August 2017

Primary School Teacher Rachel Webster: How your Year 7s have been taught maths | MrBarton

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On this episode of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast, I spoke to Rachel Webster.

Rachel is a former primary school teacher who is taking on the role of a Primary Maths Specialist with the White Rose Maths Hub from September.

The reason I wanted to interview Rachel is that for many years I do not feel I have been teaching each new crop of Year 7s as well as I could have done. Dylan Wiliam has said one of the most important things for a teacher to know is where their learners are at, and I have made the mistake of pretty much assuming these Year 7s know very little about maths. I have introduced…

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#summaths | Arithma-ticks

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August Bank Holiday Sunday 2017 – glorious sunshine, lots of mathematicians and a spot of codebreaking… What more could you ask for?

The first part of this story actually happened a few months ago, and once again highlights the absolute brilliance of Teacher Twitter. After my initial excitement of having an excuse to go down to Bletchley Park AND enjoy it with a bunch of people as geeky as I am, I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it to #summaths. It’s quite a way to travel from York, and expensive to drive down and stay all by yourself. I tweeted as much. And within a couple of hours I had…

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Ask Uncle Colin: Reversing Fibonacci | Colin

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Dear Uncle Colin,

I’m aware of Binet’s formula for finding the $n$th Fibonacci number, $F_n = \frac{\phi^n – (-\phi)^{-n}}{\sqrt{5}}$, and wondered if there was an inverse version – to find $n$ given a Fibonacci number.

— Fibonacci Explicit Inverse, Getting Extremely Nervous But Am Understanding More

Hi, FEIGENBAUM, and thank you for your message!

I have two answers to this: one a ‘good enough for engineers’ sort of answer, and one a ‘doing it properly’ one.
Good enough for engineers

The $(-\phi)^{-n}$ term in Binet’s formula is generally small. For $n=1$, its contribution to the…

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Experiencing 100 with Y1 | garethmetcalfe

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Here’s an idea for helping children to experience numbers up to 100. I came across it in a NCETM video in October last year (not quite in time to use it with class).

On the video, a year 1 class had a display on which they count the school days in a year. The number of days was shown using dienes, Numicon and symbolically. The children described how many days there had been, for example, on the 27th day as two sets of ten days and 7 more. After 100 days the class held a 100-themed party to celebrate.

The children saw the number of days increasing gradually; they saw ten ones become one…

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#summaths | Arithma-ticks

teachingbattleground

August Bank Holiday Sunday 2017 – glorious sunshine, lots of mathematicians and a spot of codebreaking… What more could you ask for?

The first part of this story actually happens a few months ago, and once again highlights the absolute brilliance of Teacher Twitter. After my initial excitement of having an excuse to go down to Bletchley Park AND enjoy it with a bunch of people as geeky as I am, I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it to #summaths. It’s quite a way to travel from York, and expensive to drive down and stay all by yourself. I tweeted as much. And within a couple of hours I had…

Continue reading here:

http://ift.tt/2wQ9W8m

Question Level Analysis Workbooks for June 2017 papers | JustMathsMel

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As usual I’m sharing excel workbooks that you can use to analyse your cohort level data from Edexcels ResultsPlus … unfortunately these ones don’t have the “multiprint” option (…yet! … I’m working on it!) but I’ve put a blank version in the workbook too as we’ve always printed the blank versions off and got students to fill them in when we use papers for internal assessments as I’m sure these papers will be used by lots of people as mocks next year! What I’ve also done if you want to input the data and produce the sheets for your students yourselves I’ve put some conditional formatting on the…

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The fearful times tables | Eleni Pepona

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A couple months back, I introduced the concept of multiplication as the result of successive additions to Daphne and we started practising the two times table albeit with a twist. In the UK, times tables go by the type, 1×2, 2×2, 3×2, 4×2, 5×2 etc. However, I thought that in order to get her used to the notation first and also to make it much, much simpler to her so she can feel she can easily apply what she already knows (mental addition of two numbers) I’d go with the type of tables that children learn in other European countries, 2×1, 2×2, 2×3, 2×4, 2×5 etc. i.e. effectively doubling….

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Experiencing 100 with Y1 | garethmetcalfe

teachingbattleground

Here’s an idea for helping children to experience numbers up to 100. I came across it in a NCETM video in October last year (not quite in time to use it with class).

On the video, a year 1 class had a display on which they count the school days in a year. The number of days was shown using dienes, Numicon and symbolically. The children described how many days there had been, for example, on the 27th day as two sets of ten days and 7 more. After 100 days the class held a 100-themed party to celebrate.

The children saw the number of days increasing gradually; they saw ten ones become one…

Continue reading here:

http://ift.tt/2wZdjsG

Mathematical Miscellany #15 | Colleen Young

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From Colin Foster on Nrich we have Mathematical Etudes where he discusses lovely rich tasks and tedious exercises! An important read as we begin another school year I feel, the more our students have to think about a task, the more they will learn. I agree with Colin liking the factors task, I have used … Continue reading Mathematical Miscellany #15

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