MathsClass

Each year for the Term 3 SDD (Staff Development Day), the four schools (three 7-10 and one 11-12) in the collegiate I work in get together for a combined program.

In recent years, Sydney Water has been encouraging households to save water. “With limited and highly variable rainfall in the catchments, the community can no longer rely on water from the dams.” source

I think this is essential viewing for Mathematics teachers. I’ve been waiting for a meeting with my faculty to show them, which I got to do on Thursday.

Dan Meyer blogs at dy/dan, which you are already reading as a maths teacher… right?

I really appreciate having my own classroom for many reasons, but one is the ability to place student work (the fun stuff) around the classroom.

I just posted on my personal blog about how I use the web, looking at how the various technologies (RSS) and tools (Google Reader, Delicious, Twitter) fit together.

Some chocolate discussion starters for looking at bar graphs: a series of chocolate bar graphs.

The end of term/year often brings lots of disruptions. So, as much as I like to keep teaching till the end, some days require something a little different. I like hands-on quasi-mathematical activities that allow every student to engage with and complete. And on Thursday, just before having one of those disrupted days, I found this…

I’m about to get into Surface Area with Year 8. Of course, there will be chocolate. But, since I last looked at Surface Area with Year 9 I’ve been thinking about Heat Sinks.

This is an amusing video to introduce probability… some of my Year 8s found it hilarious.

Year 8 were recently assessed on solving equations and I was a little perplexed by the results.

An excuse to use chocolate in a maths lesson…

This week, Year 9 were looking at finding the perimeter of shapes that include curves (parts of a circle).

Here’s a quirky little activity that uses the DER laptops.

Google Sketchup is one of the applications bundled on the DER netbooks being rolled out into NSW Public High Schools in Term 3. But as it’s free, you can download it now for Windows XP/Vista & Mac OS X.

What else could you do with capacity? As I was getting a glass of juice to have with my breakfast, I was thinking that I could use this image as a quick question at the start of a lesson.