MathsClass

Inspried by this, Pythagoras in 2 minutes.

For a recent session with teachers about whole school numeracy, I created a couple of animations demonstrating:

Eddie Woo (YouTube: misterwootube), creator of over 1500 videos for students of Mathematics (with 7000+ subscribers and over 700 000 views!) has launched a second channel for teachers of Mathematics. Looks like he will be featuring videos from conferences, teaching and learning ideas, useful resources, book reviews and more.

Great idea! Looking forward to watching.

Matchbox cars, specifically that brand, have a scale written underneath.

I've always wanted to do something with that.

I think I just found the activity for the last period on the last day of the year.

Looking at the area of special quadrilaterals, I wanted the class to make the quadrilaterals starting with paper rectangles.

This particularly class, however, struggle with step-by-step instructions. A document camera would be great, but I don't have one.

So I made a set of videos, these had the benefit of being large, on the big screen and something a little different.

I am presenting twice in September about how I use technology to engage, enhance and extend in my teaching.

Back in 2012 when I first taught Extension 1 Mathematics, in particular Applications of Calculus to the Physical World - Simple Harmonic Motion (SHM), I captured this clip of my then 2 year old son:

If we can determine the altitude of a plane in front of the moon, why not try the altitude of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in front of the Sun?

Back in 2011, Nordin Zuber posted this found image on MathsLinks.

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?

Back in 2010, putting a piece of wall in our kitchen to attach a child gate to, a problem arose about evenly spacing screws.

I recently used the “Locker Problem” in a Year 7 Maths Enrichment class (mixed ability). Here are some resources I used:

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

Playing with the kids’ toys on the weekend, I came across this car and became interested by the relationship between pulling it back and how far it would travel.

Was it a linear relationship or something else?

When introducing the topic of ‘ratio’, I use the mixing of cordial as an illustration that most kids get.
The idea of using 1 part of cordial to 4 parts of water makes sense to them – and they get the idea of equivalence when you mix the cordial in a different sized container (I use the examples of using cups to fill a bottle for a picnic, and using buckets to mix a big batch for a party).

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.

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.

With laptops rolling out shortly and projectors appearing in some classrooms, we should be thinking about collecting digital media for use as stimulus or investigation material. So, the other day when filling up my young daughter’s bottles, I took some pictures.

I was preparing for part of a presentation to the staff at my school tomorrow, highlighting the importance of numeracy being included in all subject areas.

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.

A really easy way to create engagement when introducing a new topic is to explain some of it’s applications outside of the maths classroom. For Trigonometry, I use an explanation of how I used trigonometry in a previous career to find the height of trees.

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.