The last few months have been very challenging for everyone in many different ways. For me, it was adapting to working from home that was a big challenge as everything was different. Meetings online with awkward pauses and tech issues, estimating grades for exams pupils didn’t get to sit, worrying how this may impact their future, planning work for pupils not knowing who, if any, were actually completing the work, worrying about progress or lack of progress and trying to keep positive. It was tough but I actually think the next term is probably going to be tougher. We are returning to school full time from next Monday. What will this look like? At the moment, I don’t have a clue. All I know is that I have to keep 2m from all pupils unless I choose to wear a mask. This is going to alter the way my lessons are organised. I normally start to plan lessons for the first week back in the last week of the holidays but I don’t know what to plan for. It’s very confusing and unsettling. I like to be in control, know what’s happening and be completely organised and I feel very anxious not knowing what school will be like.
I don’t want this post to be all doom and gloom so I thought I would share a couple of resources that I used while working from home. My Higher class were working on logarithmic functions and I found this resource from Mathematics Vision Project. I had never used this before and particularly liked the number line questions so I put them together into a worksheet. Here’s the first two questions.
I loved the concept of placing the log expressions on the number line. Previously, I have found the pupils have trouble accepting the logs are just numbers and not some strange abstract concept. This seemed to be helpful. My worksheet can be found here but it is worth looking through the whole resource from Mathematics Vision Project shared above as there are other tasks to use.
The other resource I wanted to share was one I created myself. Still on the topic of logarithms, this task was further practice of evaluating logs but using the laws of logarithms. In the task, there are twelve expressions to be matched to fourteen answers. For the two unmatched answers, pupils have to write their own expressions.
I hope that my pupils enjoyed completing this at home compared to a more traditional worksheet. You can find a copy of the worksheet here.
Even though I am anxious about returning to school, one thing I am excited for is working with my pupils again. Setting work online and providing support is not the same as interacting in person, hearing discussions, silly chat and much more.
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