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 1: Ratio Pictures

Let's start with something I actually created myself. Ratios can be a tricky subject for some but concrete or visual things help and make it more fun. For the end of the year, sometimes you need everyone to chill out, relax, and do a small amount of maths mixed in with a large amount of colouring.

I've put the images in pretty massive so they can be downloaded and printed clearly.

 
Penguins! Drawn by me. Their hats need to be coloured in the ratio described on the sign. The rest of the colouring is free-style.

This one was made using a free gingerbread man font. 

A four-part ratio, but if you just colour in as you go along the chain it'll still be pretty easy. Drawn by me.

Ratios of candy canes, baubles, present tags and present colours! Drawn by me. The font I used for the text is called Santa's Sleigh, it's one of my Christmas favourites.

BINGO!

I love bingo. It seems to me that students do more drill questions playing bingo than they are willing to do in any other format, and don't care in the slightest that all they are doing is repetitive drill questions.

I know that as a classroom activity it is not exactly Quality Teaching, there is no deep conceptual understanding or exploration or critical thinking, but I like to think of it as a more engaging alternative to textbook work. I don't care for textbooks, especially in the junior years.

I used excel to randomly generate sheets, which means answers will sometimes be repeated. Usually I let them cross off multiples all at once, since I won't ask two questions with the same answer.

I generally write one question at a time and then every 10 or so go through the answers with the class so they can check if they missed any and to discuss method as we solve them. In some classes kids shout out a lot so this works well. With others I have found it works better to write up a few questions at a time then wander around helping people during the time everyone takes to find the answers. Obviously it depends how hard the questions are too.

All of my Bingo files are in this folder, and it contains the following items:

• Algebra Bingo (a, b and ab terms), and some questions.
• Algebra Bingo (with binomial answers in a, b, and constants), and some questions.
• Algebra Bingo Multiplication and Division (ab, ac, bc, and abc terms)
• Area Bingo (answers in centimetres squared) (Designed to work well as easy answers to square, rectangle, parallelogram, kite, rhombus, triangle questions), and some questions.
• Fractions Bingo (Good for simplifying, ok for multiplication and division too, or a mix, could also do "What fraction is x of y?" questions), and some questions.
• Indices Bingo (I used for the index laws for multiplication, division and power of a power), and some questions.
• Surds Bingo (Good for simplifying, adding and subtracting..?)
• Ratio Bingo (I used questions on simplifying ratios), and some questions.
• Also my colleagues and a class created a great powerpoint of student-written questions for area bingo as part of their year 7 area unit.

I've also used other versions where I've just given the students a range of values to choose from and had them draw their own grid. It's much easier as long as the values are simple (e.g. numbers from -10 to 10) and avoids repetitions. I've also given them a number plane to draw some points on and rolled two dice to randomly generate points.