Number Loving has been on a bit of a break lately, we needed a bit of time away to concentrate on our day jobs to be honest! But we’ve been really busy recently upgrading the website and developing lots of lovely new resources. Here are a few highlights to ease us back in. There’ll be lots more to come in the next few weeks so stay tuned!
This is a really fun lesson when teaching triangle constructions, my students love it and it really gets them talking (and thinking) about what they’re doing. Simply print off the page one copy between two and cut the triangles out so each pair of pupils will have 9 triangles. Students take it in turns to pick a triangle from their pile, they then have to describe to their partner how to construct it without showing their partner the picture. The idea is that their partner accurately constructs the triangle in their book. The students then swap over so the other one is drawing. Their team are finished when they have constructed all 9 triangles between them. This activity will really encourage students to use mathematical vocabulary and will improve their communication and literacy skills!
Negative Numbers Always Sometimes Never
This is a brilliant activity for getting students to really think about negative numbers and attack their misconceptions head on. I’ve had great feedback on these activities as they promote independent thinking, reasoning, literacy and problem solving. This activity is a free sample from one of our premium bundles so it comes will full instructions, answers and support and extension. Have a look – if you like it the bundle is only £3 for another 10 activities.
A great way to introduce surds and encourage students to use their understanding of algebraic expressions to make sense of them. Print pages 1&2 double sided and pages 3&4 double sided, then display page 5 on the board. Give pupils either pages 1&2 or 3&4, tell them to read it, make notes in their books, then answer the associated questions on the board. After 10 minutes, get them to swap their sheets so they have the other pair of pages. After 20 minutes they should have taught themselves the basics on surds whilst you’ve put your feet up and have a well deserved cup of tea! I would complete the lesson with a little look at simplifying surds, then get them to revisit their answers to page 5 and simplify anything they can.
A new favourite of mine are target tables, super easy to use, really engaging for pupils and already differentiated! These are so simple and effective they can be used regularly in lessons (also no printing required – give the copier a rest!). Basically pupils answer the questions but they have to achieve a target set by you and each question is given a different number of points depending on difficulty. Have a look at our target table for the Sine Rule to get the idea, this is a free sample from one of our bundles so it has full instructions, answers and ideas for extension. If you like it we have lots more of these on the site and two premium bundles brimming with them!
