MathsClass

For a few years, I’ve noticed that kids not only don’t know/struggle with their times tables, but also general ‘number sense’.

I put up my first image on Dan Meyer’s 101 Questions yesterday, Kitchen Scale. Wander over there.

What’s the first question that comes to your mind?

It’s the last day of term here, so teachers might want to spend some time today fixing up their room. So, I brought my Made4Math Monday forward.

I needed some times table posters for my classroom, but the posters you can buy tend to be for younger students and I haven’t seen a grid version (rather than each table listed separately).

Whilst often used as a textbook example, I had never seen negative numbers used in a lift before.

In 2007, I wrote about a resource, a Number Spider, that I used as a lesson starter.

Here are some resources for the new year…

You might have seen this map featured around the place recently:

So I wondered, what if the largest countries had the biggest populations?

I showed WCYDWT: Spacing Evenly to some of my classes this week. A couple of reflections…

A real-life version of this problem presented itself today.

(Source: Elementary Math Mastery, Rhonda Farkota)

Jeff of Webmaths points out a new Australian TV show, Letters and Numbers.

This week, my Year 8s have been looking at inequality signs, graphing inequalities and solving simple (one-step) inequalities. Today, after solving inequalities, we played a simple game. A simple, obvious game, that really doesn’t warrant a blog post.

I’ve been meaning to try ClassTools.net for a while. With ClassTools.net you can make interactive Flash games, from a range of templates, then save and share them.

I used to think that I knew what 1 billion was, i.e. 1 000 000 000 000. Then a couple of years ago, I looked on Wikipedia and found there were two defintions: Long and short scales.

If you don’t have The Big Picture from boston.com in your RSS feeds, it’s time to add it. Alan Taylor regularly collects some fascinating photos together. This edition, At work.

Here’s a video about the history of number, in particular the numbers 0 and 1.  Our Year 7 program begins the year looking at ancient number systems, so this video will fit in nicely.