Day 3: Christmas Maths Worksheets Part 1

A lot of "holiday themed" worksheets are just normal questions with a few themed images around the edges. Which is ok I guess, but I'm looking for my themes to be a little more integrated.

Maths-Drills have a bunch that can be found here, and they range in how genuinely Christmassy they are. They include a few of the lame kind, but they have made a genuine effort with the others, and in any case they are all pretty and well-presented. And free!

Problem contexts include adding presents on Santa's list, ordering numbered baubles, Christmas word problems, reading tables about Santa's route between different cities, number patterns about how many toys the elves make each day, and of course a number plane picture.

Oops! I failed primary school maths :(

Some Olympics

My year 9s are beginning data, and I thought we might try to find some graphs about the Olympics to interpret, so I googled "Olympics graphs" and came up with some fun things.

Olympic Records - Match graphs of Olympic records over time to the sport they represent. They suggested giving the list of sports as a "possible support" but I think that I would do that for all but the best classes. My year 9s tried this today and needed a lot of support on top of that. Still I think for those that did engage it was interesting and it enabled us to talk about measurement units and data trends. It would be a really cool activity with a higher-achieving class.

Graph the Olympics - A great idea for Olympics lead-up time especially, so a bit late for us, and again one best suited to a higher-achieving class or higher-year class. Lots of deep understanding possible in deciding how to best make predictions, which data to use, which measures to use etc. If I'm teaching in another 4 years, I'll try to remember this!

Olympic Logic Problems - Actually there are a lot of links here (in fact it's largely a list of the resources at nrich.maths.org), including to the Olympic Records activity above, but the ones I like best are the logic problem ones. I'm setting some for year 7s weekend homework menu this weekend.

And for a bit of a laugh, here are some graphs:
(although the comments make a point, the Venn diagram is off)

Furbles

This is a great site. I personally like the older version rather than the demo of the new one, but both are good. They are a great fun way to introduce data. I love the idea of actually visualising the connection between your original data (which is more than just some numbers) and the graph that forms.

It forms a good basis for discussing the pros and cons of different types of graph, and therefore when you might choose each graph to display your information. And as all good students know, the important thing is to get AS MANY AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN and make their eyes follow your mouse around.