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.  

Reading, Writing and REVISION!

I was at a Christmas party on Saturday night, gleefully lost in my own food and cocktail induced euphoria, which is abnormal seeing as we´re one week away from the end of term.  But happy I was until a colleague decided that it was an appropriate time to inform me that my students would write their IGCSE Maths exam on April 30th.  Their first exam.  Take away two weeks we use to write mock exams, Carnival and Easter holidays and a large gulp of my festive gin and tonic quickly followed the news as well as an elevated heart rate and a such lack of social skills as all I could do was obsess over whether they would be ready.  So how did I spend the next day?  Using my new found connections on twitter to find out how other maths teachers out there help prepare their students for the big exams. ´

Currently I´m in my seventh year of teaching.  That means six rounds of exam season and so I feel fairly confident that I´ve got a few effective tricks up my sleeve, but as we all know the learning process never stops.

Here are a few ideas both tried and new that I will be going with this year:

• games -  these are great to reinforce exam key words.  I like Pictionary and talking heads in particular.  In talking heads three students come up to the board and face the class with their backs to the white board.  They each draw a key word from the hat and I write that key word over their heads so that they cannot see it but the class can.  They then take turns asking yes or no questions and the class can only respond with Yes/No/Maybe. 

• Past papers -  the best source to prepare students for their exam.  I create a spreadsheet with every objective that students are tested on and do some formatting with my spread sheet to quickly see who has trouble with which topic.  That´s not an uncommon trick, however, Mr Reddy of www.mrreddy.com has an excellent idea to take it to the next step.  I´m going to try this this year: http://mrreddy.com/blog/2013/12/mail-merge-after-a-maths-mock/.  Also check out his other tips in terms of revision.  As usual, great stuff there!

• perhaps send this around to parents and students http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7387621.stm

• Another good idea are ready made flash cards with all of the information ready to go: http://secondarymaths.wikispaces.com/GCSE+Revision+eFlashCards

• Also looks nice, though not sure how much students would use this: http://gcse.com/maths/index.htm.  Maybe I will use it in class for the odd topic. 

• And naturally William Enemy failed to disappoint with revision grids as well as other links to great resources.  Find his stuff at: http://www.greatmathsteachingideas.com/?s=revision

Panic attack over.  I´m actually REALLY looking forward to trying some of these great ideas and making the revision period a bit more fun this year.  I would still appreciate any other ideas as I realise this list is quite short.  Send me a message on twitter or please comment on this post. 

Work Smart...

I cannot believe my luck finding this site.  There are so many excellent resources on: http://mathsbox.org.uk/shape.php I can´t really summarise it!  Use it, it has all math strands and the resources are professional, colourful and so VALUABLE.  You don´t have to spend your time making games or treasure hunts...they are here.  They are levelled and they are LOVELY for the last lesson of the day.  There are also great starters and plenaries, so much...I keep discovering more!  I tried the Pythagoras and Volume of a Cuboid bingo games and both classes loved it. 

Classroom Displays

Today I´ve decided to share two ways I think I´ve decorated my classrooms well. 

The first one is my display board.  I place extra sheets for work in class, stuff students miss when absent or for projects in each year groups folder.  I know to check there if I ever need to grab something quickly for a student. 

I´m Just Not a Maths Person...

If I had a dollar, a loonie, a pound...even a bolivar for every time I heard the title of this post, I would be a lot closer to owning my sea side dream home.  I get it, and if you teach maths, you get it too.  Most people do not consider themselves Maths people, and they are proud to let you know this.  They hate maths, freak out when they have to deal with numbers, are self diagnosed with dyscalculia, or even physically shudder at the mention of the dreaded M word.  Personally, I feel this phenomenon began because of the way Maths was taught.  Traditionally a math lesson shows us a procedure and the student must follow prescriptive steps in order to reach an accurate answer.  The only answer, which is...boring.  Why you need to know the topic, where the method originated, how is knowing this helpful and in what industry might it be used?  Most of the time we fail to answer these questions and stick to the black and white "this is how it's done!" style of pedagogy instead.

For other educators - Creativity in Maths

I was recently given a link to a TED talk about how creativity is killed in the classroom, not just in Maths but in all subjects.  I was intrigued and started to think about my own methods in lessons. 

TED talk:



I realised that thought I am not strict with my students following my own problem solving techniques, I also wasn´t encouraging them when they were able to accurately arrive to the answer themselves.  How boring!  Everyone likes to feel as though they are intelligent and creative and I have realised how satisfied students are when they are creative in their methods.  I have been looking for more articles on the topic and found one which looks at the typical tendencies of educators to focus on traditional prescribed methods and how we should allow students more time to find solutions creatively as long as accuracy is maintained. 

Article:

http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Creativity_Essential/

Changing the culture of how we view Maths...

An interesting article in The Guardian.  I think we were pushing for this change at Kings College a long time ago.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/jan/30/love-english-hate-maths-teacher-schools

Maths in Animation

Teachers, this is a really great video highlighting how animators use algebra...my students LOVED it!

1.618

Ever wonder what the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, a snail´s shell and supermodels have in common.  It´s all mathematical and it´s all about the golden ratio.  Interested?  I found a website which explores different ways the Golden Ratio exists around us. 

http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~dlnarain/golden/activities.htm

Daily Maths Challenge

I love this site for a starter.  My students are especially keen after breaks and lunch time for something a bit competitive and a bit of fun! 

http://www.transum.org/software/sw/starter_of_the_day/index.htm