Week 2 Challenge Review, and end of the stupid challenge idea

The Counting On activity went well, and we used blu-tac to create the giant graph on the wall. We did run out of room for the prime numbers column and had to overlap.

Edit: Here is a picture of the graph. In future I would consider using a large floor space instead of the wall, so that we could fit all the prime numbers in properly! And discuss what would happen to the graph if we did more numbers. And if I put it on the wall again I would include labelled axes.

They loved the active "yes or no" categorising game. Each student had a number, and two ends of the room had "Yes" and "No" up on the wall. I called out questions like "Are you a prime number?", "Are you an even number?", "Are you divisible by 3?", "If you add 5 to yourself, do you have 4 as a factor?" and so on. It provided a good opportunity when someone was unsure to ask the whole class relevant questions like "How can you tell if a number is divisible by 3". And they loved it.

I'm already over the challenge thing

 Not surprising, but with contributions from a personal situation, I lost a lot of motivation. Plus two of my classes annoy me. But Year 7 continue to be lovely, so I will keep doing my best for them at least.

Year 7: We're going to be looking at prime and composite numbers and factors. The main activity I want to use for primes and composites is one from the Counting On numeracy framework. Students draw rectangles to find the factors of numbers (a different number on each sheet) then lay them on the floor (or stick to the wall) to create a bar graph of how many factors they have. Then you can instantly see prime numbers, and how one is not a prime, but has a special column all to itself. It also separates square numbers from other composites. After they've got the general idea I want to try an idea from Brent Vasicek at Scholastic for an in-class assessment of their understanding. I think I will give each child a number and then get them to sort themselves according to different criteria, e.g. primes over here, composites over there, sit down if you have 4 as a factor etc.

Week 1 Challenge Review

As per my previous post, I tried a few new things!

Count to a billion with Year 10 was not a huge success. Probably a third of the class had both the curiosity and the good behaviour that was required to get something out of this idea. Others did some timing and some calculations but didn't engage much in the investigation aspects, others offered some suggestions but produced no work of their own.

Some good points:

• Everyone was involved in converting a large number of seconds into years, so at least some content was covered.
• We discussed
• the variation that would occur between different people and different estimation choices.
• finding the mean of numbers and found an average of two times.
• which large numbers would take the longest to say.
• how maths in the real world is more like this, gathering information however you can, making choices, estimating, rounding, approximating, and not coming up with one correct answer, but one answer justified by working.
• We practised saying large numbers.
• Some of us had some fun.

Based on all that, and the difference in behaviour between the classes, I think it would work nicely with my year 7 class, so I'll try that later in the term.

Year 9 enjoyed "4 strikes and you're out" a lot, with some students quickly volunteered to come up and write their own. I asked questions about which numbers they could tell without guessing as we went, and was very impressed with some of their answers.  We used addition questions to warm up to the idea, then multiplication of fractions afterwards (what we were working on). Doing this on the board didn't engage all the students, and getting them to work in pairs would probably have been worse, but it was a nice thing to try.  Difficult with a large and poorly-behaved class (what isn't?).

Zero to Five was also quite successful. Some kids seemed to engage more with the examples on the board when using this strategy, asking more questions as I explained so that they could hold up 5 fingers. It was good for me to see the lower numbers come up and know that I needed to explain more. I told them "if you don't understand because you weren't listening to me, keep your hand down", which was also helpful to see!

Year 7s Weekend Homework Menu was fun. They had a choice of a game, a worksheet or a Tarsia puzzle. It took a bit of time, more than setting regular homework, but students came in one Monday showing me the puzzles and talking about the game, so it was probably worth the time. I think I'll have to review it again after a few more weeks.

Refreshed

A Saturday spent renewing myself and my motivation for teaching through the experiences and ideas of others has led me to creating a blog.

I'm so full of new ideas and a desire to improve my teaching, little by little, that I'm challenging myself to try at least one new/different/interesting thing each week with each of my junior maths classes.

Week 1:
Year 7: Offer students a "weekend homework menu", an idea I got from Alycia Zimmerman on Scholastic. This offers student choice, differentiation and potential family involvement. Students choose from options that could include practise worksheets, harder problem or puzzle worksheets, games to play at home with their family, projects, website activities or research. I have a clever little group but some of them have struggled with the puzzles I've presented them, so I'm really looking forward to seeing if this helps. Plus it gives me an opportunity to share fun maths games that we don't often have time for in class.

Year 9: Play "4 strikes and your out", another Scholastic idea, from Marilyn Burns this time. Basically it's maths hangman, enhanced with key questions once they have some information and need to make sensible choices from there. I'm also going to try Fist to Five from the Teacher Channel (although I think I'll just call it Zero to Five) as an instant feedback tool. I liked the idea of Dylan Wiliam's coloured cups but this class doesn't inspire me to give them anything potentially distracting or breakable.

Year 10: Run a Count to a Billion (from Mathsisfun) lesson. I'm a bit sick of doing textbook work with this class, but they often struggle with more open-ended tasks and they are a large class. The unit on time seems like a good opportunity to explore some more interesting ideas. We'll see.