My Classroom

Each year I try to refresh the displays in my classroom. I don’t have a huge amount of wall space and there are a few displays I like to keep up all the time. These have key facts and information that I refer to often including a number line, square numbers, prime numbers, question stems etc. Last year, I used the whole of the back wall as an area for storing revision worksheets for my classes. These were there for any pupil looking for extra practice on a topic and proved useful throughout the year. Other than topping up the folders, this will stay the same this year.

So what will be new in my classroom this year? I have one thing I want to add. I saw this on Twitter last week and instantly knew I wanted this in my room.

https://twitter.com/AlexB19899/status/1287690176995762178

The idea shared by @AlexB19899 was to have ” 5 minute frayer time where pupils try it in pairs and using dictionaries to fill theirs in. Then a quick feedback where we fill the class one in together while they add to their own. Love hearing their examples/non examples.”

I can see me using this in a couple of different ways with my classes. The first being as a whole class teaching tool where I am introducing a new word/concept and I fill in the Frayer Model and then leave it up during the next few lessons as a reminder to the class. The second would be as a revision tool – I could ask the class to complete a Frayer Model for a given word/concept that they had previously met and then share the results on the class Frayer Model.

I am hoping that using this regularly with pupils will help improve their mathematical vocabulary as this is something they often struggle with.

August is here already

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.

This week – no.8

This week was a pretty poor teaching week for me. I felt that most of my lessons were pretty lacklustre. I think the problem was that all my time was taken up with other school related tasks that my own planning got put to the end of my list. I don’t like when this happens but it’s the reality that occurs sometimes. After a tough week I was feeling like I didn’t want to attend the Moray Maths Conference on Saturday. However, I am really glad I went. The conference reenergised me and I came away with lots of ideas to implement. My only concern is that I won’t have time to do this – but I must try to make time as it is important to focus on teaching and learning.

So this post I am going to write about my takeaways from the conference instead of my lessons from the past week. Hopefully there is something useful for other teachers to takeaway too.

Fraction Decimal Percentage Pyramid

After spending a few lessons looking at how to convert between fractions, decimals and percentages I wanted to find a task to check for understanding that was not simply a list of questions. This is what I came up with: pyramids.

The New Term

It’s been a while since I have written a blog post. My last set of posts were written at the end of each week reflecting on what had been happening with my classes during the week. I really enjoyed writing these as it allowed me to look back to see the progress made with each class. I have yet to decide if I will continue with that style of blog post as it was a large time commitment. Maybe a monthly post instead.

In this post I want to share a few of the things that I am looking forward to working on during the next term. I am wary of taking on too much but these are areas which I feel ready to tackle. So here they are:

The week that was (no.24)

This week was a good week. I found out that our department had passed our SQA verification. Whilst I was confident that we would, it was a relief to get official confirmation. Other than that, my week has been spent focussing on senior classes, trying to sort out change of levels and starting the build up to exam time.

My classes have been working on:

• S2: expanding single brackets and stem and leaf diagrams
• S3: factorising quadratics
• N5: vectors
• AH: inverse matrices, transformations and Euclidean Algorithm

Progress of the week

The week that was (no. 23)

It was a four day week this week but it still felt really busy. It was mostly due to having the S4-6 parents evening on Wednesday. I had a full schedule which meant I was talking from 4.30pm to 7pm without stopping. I always find it so useful to chat to parents and wish there was a way for us to be able to do that more often.

My classes have been studying the following:

• S2 – expanding single brackets
• S3 – factorising expressions
• National 5 – vectors
• Advanced higher – matrices

How to teach? Expand single brackets

I was introducing how to expand single bracket to a class this week and it got me thinking. I have taught this hundreds of times and in many different ways but what is the best way? Recently I have used an area model to demonstrate. The examples I might use are:
I really like this method as it shows very clearly why 12(x + 1) = 12x + 12 and leads nicely into using a grid for expanding brackets.

So why did I want to change to a different method?

Whilst exploring Open Middle I came across this problem.

The week that was (no. 22)

This week started with a snow day and ended with a holiday so I was only at work for three days. Even though, it was still a very busy week. We had a mini inspection, with a team from the Council in doing focus groups and observations.

My classes this week were working on:

• S2 – calculating bearings and simplifying expressions

• S3 – foreign currency

• N5 – trigonometric identities and percentages

• AH – no lessons this week since I only see them on Mon and Fri

The week that was (no. 21)

This week saw the return of my senior classes after study leave. This meant I was back to a very busy timetable. It can be tough returning prelims to pupils. It’s great if they have done well as there are big smiles but it is tricky if they haven’t done well. I become torn between the sympathetic tone of “it was a tough paper, don’t get too upset by it” and the harsher tone of “if you had actually worked hard you might have done better”.