Numeracy Display on the Door

This term my school's Numeracy Team set up a little competition for a Numeracy Display. This is the second one actually. At the end of last year each faculty had to put up a display about Numeracy in our subject area.

This time the challenge was to pick a classroom door and decorate it with numerical facts or information relating to our subject area and the room number.

Here's my door, courtesy of my year 9 class:

 The secondary idea here is that we'll work towards having displays like this on all the classroom doors, not only promoting numeracy, but making it easy for new students to find their rooms!

Day 24: Christmas origami

I've always done a bit of origami at the end of the year to decorate the classroom.

One of my favourites from other years has been this sweet little Santa. Unfortunately the instructions are not in English but most of it is pretty clear and a quick bit of translation is easy enough.

This year I tried a bunch from this extensive list.

This little bear is already off to carry a Christmas present. Each year some of the staff do "Christmas Angels",  which is like a secret Santa but you do little things for the person all week.

The poor snowman can't stand up with his heavy scarf on. He had to have a lie down for his photo shoot.

Day 18: Christmas Tarsia

You can turn ANYTHING into a Christmas activity or decoration, if you really want to.

I made some tarsias in the "rhombus" shape and with some green, red and white paper and some decorative cutting, they become Mathsmas decorations!

Now I've caught up!! Back to one a day. Not long to go now!

Day 14: Snowflakes

Paper snowflakes. A Mathsmas essential. My snowflake-making craft has improved significantly since the advent of Mathsmas. Largely through lessons learnt from "Make your own paper snowflakes", which I bought as a gift for a colleague then shamelessly borrowed and used extensively. Did you know they are supposed to be hexagon-based? You probably did. I didn't.

So I did a worksheet all those years ago with a cloze passage, some facts, symmetry, and folding based on working out the angle to fold it on. Here it is.

Of course there are other cool snowflakes to make, like these twisty paper ones. For me, the little snips and cuts and experimentation of the traditional ones has a certain feel to it.

Day 13: Christmas Enlargements

A couple of years in a row I had the lowest year 8 class, trying to do rates and ratios at the end of term 4. Not the easiest task. One thing I latched onto was enlargements using a grid.

Originally I was just taking images from the internet of popular animals and cartoon characters, but obviously to share here I'll stick to my own work. No new illustrations I'm afraid, but I've reused my reindeer and a penguin from the ratio pictures.

Grid Enlargement Reindeer Grid Enlargement Penguin

Here is the proforma to make some more (not that it's hard to make, but save yourself some time). All you need to do is insert the image.

Grid Enlargement Proforma

Day 11: Oh Mathsmas Tree

My sister called me yesterday to give me the news story that mathematicians have worked on the calculations required for the perfect Christmas tree. Best made-up-headline-word ever: Treegonometry.

Not sure if my tree from previous years is going to cut it.

This was the year I made it. I cut into a whole lot of sheets of green (and brown) paper and assembled with lots of blutac and masking tape.

Then we decorated. With origami santas and presents and some other stuff. There's a bauble that says "I love octagons".

I took the tree down piece by piece and reassembled it last year.

This year I'm thinking of going three-dimensional, after seeing this tutorial linked on Pinterest. Drawing up a net for that would be a great maths activity.

After construction, I might refer to that article to calculate the required size for our tree topper. And I'm sure there are more ways to enrich decorating the Mathsmas tree. Maybe some baubles with problems on them to solve before using to decorate. Hmm....

The Decennial Dalek

There was a lot of procrastinating about the Dalek. The students voted to have a Dalek, and my year 10 class especially liked to ask where the Dalek was.

One of them in particular.

"Miss, look at the wall. What do you see?"
*I hang my head in mock shame*
"Because I'll tell you what I DON'T see! A Dalek!!!"

So I decided to name the Dalek in his honour.

We all agreed that "memorial" was inappropriate, but had trouble working out a better term. So since he was completing year 10, we went with "Decennial" for, I understand, a 10th anniversary. He was pretty happy with the honour.

Donald is now over beside the Pencil Pal, to make room for the Dalek.

And Stitch remains in his old spot, pretty much. One of my year 7 students wrote up that tip, and I had to ammend it on instruction from a year 11. Although he did say you only appear to have more mass, to an observer. And less height or something. "So travelling very fast in space you appear shorter and fatter?" "Yes." I'll take his word for it.

Classroom decoration updates and open-ended questions

I made a wall decal! Actually, I made a fabric first, then a decal. Spoonflower is awesome. I wish I could wallpaper my classroom, then I would make loads of awesome maths wallpapers. But this will have to do. Inspired by the pencil creature from Donald-in-Mathmagic-Land.

Our faculty recently bought some books on open-ended questions in Maths and I've been using the ideas a lot teaching measurement to year 7. My favourite activities so far involve perimeter and area of letters.

The first one begins by showing a letter drawn on cm grid paper. Telling the kids that the diagonal is approximately 1.4cm, we work out the perimeter of the letter. Then the challenge - write your name on cm grid paper with a perimeter between 98cm and 102cm. This was awfully fun.

It was great to have a project that involved a bit of planning, but lots of checking, trial-and-error, and editing. And looks cool on the wall!

I did one too. As you can see, I'm not shy about working out, unlike a lot of the kids!

Then we looked at area. We tried to make letters with an area of ten square centimetres.

I haven't been posting much, but this weekend I'm starting something special for the end of school year! It's going to be fun.

Net Animals/Characters

Ever since I made Angry Birds with year 10 and put them up at the front of the room, my year 7s have been asking about them.

"Do we get to make Angry Birds?"

"When do we get to make Angry Birds?"

"When are we doing shapes?"

Then, every lesson after starting Shapes...

"Are we making the Angry Birds this lesson?"

So we made Angry Birds. And for homework, they had to take a net home and turn it into an animal or character. Here are a few cute ones:

A pentagonal pyramid echidna (a bit squished):

Some mice:

 

An octahedral fish:

And the amazing SpongeBob Squarepants net:

Vote for Batman

Last week I took nominations for new characters for my wall and today we had the voting. My year 7 class were the only ones who even noticed the nominations sheet and contributed to it, but year 9 got VERY excited about the voting, demanded that Batman be added and a fierce "vote for Batman" campaign was pursued for the few minutes of voting time. All classes during the voting came up with other ideas and this just shows that I will end up making DOZENS of characters and covering my whole wall with them. But for now, the winner was a Dalek, closely followed by Yoda. A significant step up in complexity from my previous choices!! But awesome. The kids were very keen to have maths tips in Yoda-speak, so I will probably do two.

Paper Recycling Monster

Students! Stop throwing worksheets, scrap paper, and your tests you did badly on into my garbage bin!

I decided it was about time I had a paper recycling system for my room. I need to stand by what I believe and demonstrate these ideals to my students. Inspired by some cute stuff on Pinterest, I decided my system should be a monster. Here is how I did mine:

We use a lot of paper, and usually use the box lids to collect exam papers together, while the rest of the box is used less often. Then some paper, black marker, tape (and/or staples) and scissors.

 Cut the side part-way down.

Then fold them over to create an angle for the mouth and tape down or staple. I stapled the first one I did and some staples held while other didn't. This one I used just tape.

 

 Then cut out some triangles to give some teeth.

Cut some eyes out of paper and draw some pupils. Cut tabs on the bottom.

Turn the tabs in opposite directions and tape down.

Monster! This one is going to hold our student absence sheets in the staffroom.

Paddlepop Stick Angles

I was inspired by a pin of a poster of angle types made from paddle-pop sticks.

Rather than making a poster each I decided to finally make some use of the string across my room. So they made one definition each and I made a title.

This was done in our first double-period on this topic, which was spent mostly reviewing types of angles, learning naming conventions for angles, and estimating and measuring angles. Oh and complimentary and supplementary angles. It was a busy time. We will probably add more diagrams when we do angles in parallel lines.

Thoughts for next time:

• Leave more time. Craft always takes longer than I think!
• Have more glue. It is hard to share around two glue bottles among 20 kids.
• Punch holes in card first, so the holes don't go through their writing.
• Do a demonstration one, largely to point out what size to write so that it is visible.
• Check spelling!

Another Pin down!!

A Growing Addiction

The time that Pinterest is absorbing in my life continues to grow, so I need to resolve to actually use some of these ideas. I want to acutally use this pinboard as a working space of teaching ideas. Add things, but also use them and remove them. I'm determined to do what I can and adapt lots of the fun primary ideas I find to my classes.

Of course some great ideas just don't come at the right time, and will have to wait. I won't teach symmetry or time again until next year, for example. 

So I have started by printing out the comics I'd gathered, laminating them and adding them to the comics section of my classroom.

Year 7 start "Angles and Shapes" next week, so I think I'll get some paddle-pop sticks and have a go at these as posters:

Year 10 after their exam next week will be doing some algebra that includes indices (I think - I haven't planned that far ahead!). I've been considering with some classes that we do too much teaching that is one topic per lesson then move on rather than frequently returning to the ideas and mixing things up more. I'm considering adapting this idea to index laws:

The centre could be a term in index form, and the categories could be multiplication, division and powers of powers (where they write a question that gives that answer) and expanded form. Maybe if the powers are lowish they could also have a substitution category where they pick a value for the pronumeral and evaluate the term. Then we could do one per lesson as we finish the topic and then later when we are revising.

Teaching and Pinterest

I've recently become addicted to Pinterest. For crafts and cooking and similar things, it is incredibly good for getting lots of ideas quickly. For teaching I feel that as a very visual sharing method, it isn't as obvious, but I'm still keeping an eye out. A lot of things under Education (if they relate to education at all) are just titles linking to "40 great teaching ideas" or something, and frankly, if I wanted to read, I wouldn't be on Pinterest. Searching for "math(s) teaching" or "classroom decoration" or other more specific things is better.

Things I have found pinterest useful for:

Maths jokes/comics

Inspirational quotes (now that I have Stitch to do this job, I need lots of quotes)

Lower level numeracy ideas such as pairs to ten (primary school teachers are great at colourful fun stuff)

And a few other fun ideas.

More Decoration

I used to have a "Maths tip of the day" on the wall but I didn't change it enough, so that title needed to change. Then somewhere out of staffroom brainstorming came the idea of Donald (in the style of his appearance in Mathmagic land) speaking the tip. Then it could be changed as irregularly as I liked, and could also include inspirational quotes. A year 10 student enlarged the picture for me and I painted it at home, then with the help of Dry Erase Cloud Decals, he was created:

Once the idea was started, it had to go further, of course. So Stitch joined him:

And now my classroom looks even more awesome :)