1. Areas of Flags
Areas of Flags (from Owen134866 on TES Resources). One of my colleagues introduced me to this brilliant series of worksheets (and powerpoints) that use flags as a context for finding areas of rectangles, triangles, parallelograms, and trapeziums. There is also a further activity with circles.
2. BC Numeracy Tasks
I was browsing on the website of Peter Liljedahl from Simon Fraser University, Canada. (I was reading a paper of his about task design.) I discovered that he was on a team to develop tasks to assess students’ numeracy in British Columbia. They look as though they are lovely, well thought out tasks. However, there aren’t any solutions that I can see, likely because these are in use as assessment tasks in BC. I note that some of them are too Canadian, though! “Last week I went out crabbing with a friend. We took my canoe and paddled out to a point just off Belcarra Park and threw in our trap.” I’m not sure my city-dwelling, mostly expat students would know what to make of this. However, there are lots of great tasks here and I reckon I will try some of them out soon.
3. GCSE Five a Day Sheets
These GCSE starter sheets, Five a Day, by Corbett Maths. Each sheet has five questions. They are available for numeracy, Foundation, and Higher, and answers are provided. One sheet for every day of the year. I have asked some of my students to use them at home on weekends, too.
4. “Think of a Number” Lesson for HCF and LCM
I’m planning to use this lovely lesson about highest common factor (HCF) and lowest common multiple (LCM) from the Mathematics Assessment Project. I like that it provides a pre-test (which could be used as homework) to help me plan the lesson. The main tasks are really well explained in the teacher notes and include a whole class discussion with mini whiteboard responses, and a card sorting activity. Then there’s a post-test to see what students have learned. All 100 of the lessons in this series are designed with a pre-test and a post-test; I love that it makes it easy to see how students have improved.
The only downside of this lesson is its American vocabulary. I am going to need to use white-out to correct greatest common factor (GCF) to HCF throughout!
5. Shakespeare and Numbers
Our Head of English has started talking about upcoming celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (23 April 2016). I have been thinking about what we might do in maths to celebrate. So far I found this Numberphile video about the numbers in Shakespeare’s sonnets. I will continue hunting for some other things to use in lessons but this video (duration 4:36) will be a nice ender for lessons on that day.
What superb lesson resources have you seen or used recently? Comment below or tweet me @mathsfeedback.