Bums OFF Seats!

The saying bums on seats, seemed to be a repeated reinforcement for a sign of good teaching in the UK.  However, PD events often remind me of how painful it is to sit and listen for an entire day, even when you find it interesting.  So I challenged myself to plan more bums OFF seats lesson.  Especially for afternoon classes and when students need a little bit more activity to keep them going.  The challenge being that the experience still leads to meaningful lessons and learning and not just filling time with play time.  So here are some of my more successful, interactive lessons!

TREASURE HUNT

Today my year 12 IB Standard Level students wrote a Calculus exam.  So far we have covered differentiation, equation of a tangent, equation of a normal, stationary points and identifying local max and min.  After quite a few lessons, exercises from a textbook, myimaths tasks and in class questioning, I felt my 9 students (aren´t I lucky...9 students!) were pretty confident with their first introduction to calculus.  So as a revision lesson before their exam, I found this resource https://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/differentiation-treasure-hunt-6419334 and posted the questions around our secondary building, paired up students and sent them around with a clipboard to try and answer the questions first.  

I was astounded at how few of them could confidently tackle simple examples of what we had been studying!  But by the end, I felt that their understanding, that true understanding of procedure and methods was there.  But what it took was not a page full of questions for them to practice but by mixing them up, putting them in a different order and having students talk about how to reach an accurate result, they finally understood the procedure.  I did give them the background of what they were doing, why for example, we set the first derivative to zero (because its connected to the gradient) but this activity built their confidence for reaching an answer accurately and even though we want to make Maths fun and colourful, its still about that.  We want students to be able to arrive at the correct solutions.  

A few days later, they wrote an exam and they were confident, excited (even though it was the last lesson of a Thursday) and the results were good!

SPEED DATING

Again, I planned an interactive lesson for my year 12s.  The poor things have a double lesson and I´m new to teaching Standard Level so I want to keep them interested in our topics as much as possible.  So after spending a lesson learning about vectors, I had a double with them.  We spent the first introductory lesson doing old fashion, textbook questions and building up their experience with vectors.  The following day we had a double and so I spent the first part revising what we learned and giving them a myimaths task to practice further.  Then, when I felt they were ready, I gave them each a different question.  I then asked them to complete the question and check that they got the right answer.  I was able to differentiate at this point.  Then I had four students sit on one side of two tables put together and the other 5 would rotate along, with there always being one group of three. I had students try each others questions, mark each others work and explain to the other how to complete the question if someone wasn´t sure.  I got the idea from pinterest and it worked a treat!

NO TALKING LINEUPS

I was starting my unit on fractions/decimals/percentages and I decided to start this on a Friday, last lesson with year 7.  So, instead of having students start in the classroom we went outside.  I had prepared slips of paper with some easy fractions, decimals and percentages before hand and I also had white boards, pens and erasers ready in case my students were really weak on this topic.  But luckily there weren´t and the activity went really well.

I start with a little warm up which had nothing to do with the lesson, but it was to have a little bit of fun before I actually started to assess what they knew.  So we did a no talking line up.  I asked students to get into a line from smallest to tallest without talking but using other means to communicate.  Then we did the same thing with their birthdays so that we were youngest to oldest.  Then, I gave them the slips of paper with values like 1/4, 0.25 and 25% on them.  Because this completed the activity quickly and accurately I knew that most of my students likely had a pretty good understanding of the topic and I could spend the next part of the lesson extending them, rather than boring them with me standing at the front questioning them.