It is that time of year where the GCSE course is done and dusted for year 11s and the countdown to the final exams has well and truly begun. To quote Sir Alex Ferguson, it is “squeaky-bum time”. Our school are members of the PiXL club so we had our PPEs (Pre-public examinations) a couple of weeks […]
For a while now, I have been using this fantastic fruit machine from classtools as a way of rewarding students in lessons (think bingo games or tarsia challenges). I copy and paste a list of rewards and if a student wins one of my challenges, they get a spin on the fruit machine and win a prize. […]
Since the relaunch of MathedUp!, the majority of the site has been geared towards A-Level Maths and Further Maths. The plan always was to include KS3 and KS4 but other priorities took over etc. I have now updated the website with over 150 Smart Notebook lesson files contributed by either myself, or the fantastic Nicky Roger who […]
I have recently had quite a few discussions around the awful misconceptions many students have when dealing with negative numbers (recently discussed by @srcav here). I wince every time I hear “two negatives make a positive” and have, over the years, used various strategies to help my students develop a better understanding of what happens when we […]
Since many of our department use Smart notebook to create lesson plans on (we tend not to use Powerpoint very much, if at all), I thought it might be a good idea to have a template to help out with planning. I bundled this together as a first draft (based around my version of @TeacherToolkit excellent 5 minute […]
I recently presented for Edexcel on Innovative methods for teaching Further Mathematics. I wanted to ensure everything was accessible to teachers who are new to teaching further maths, so focussed on introducing some topics and ideas. I used a mixture of Autograph and Geogebra to demonstarte how I approach certain topics. I have also created […]
I will be giving the following pack of worksheets to my year 11s in the week building up to GCSE exam. The idea is that they do 1 worksheet per day and bring to me to get marked. I will give them lots of feedback on what they need to work on and direct them to […]
Having just finished some work with my year 10s on forming and solving equations (see this great resource they made), we have turned our attention to looking at rearranging formulae. As an introduction to this, I have used an idea that I first explored when doing my PGCE all those years ago. The idea is to take a simple […]
It’s that time of year again where we are in the thick of GCSE revision lessons. Some of this time, quite rightly, should be dedicated to exam paper practice but I find that the repetitiveness of this often leads to stale lessons and it is difficult to monitor how much progress students are actually making. My […]
A very quick one (5 minute blog post?).. Firstly I want to thank @TeacherToolkit for the 5 minute series and @DaK_74 for the fantastic idea of using it for a test analysis. My fantastic year 11s did a PPE (Pre Public Exam) recently created by PiXL. I wanted a way for them to be able to reflect on […]