Square of Area 10

This is another one from my PGCE; all those years ago now, but continues to be a favourite little investigation. I take no originality credit! I'm posting in response to @mathsatschool comment on #mathchat that students don't accept that "diamond"s are squares.

I say little, it can be anything from 1 lesson to a week or fortnight's worth.

Resources: Square spotty paper and lots of it.

1. Draw a square of area 1. Easy enough to start. I get peculiar looks at this stage...
2. Draw a sqaure of area 4. Have a look around, you get some 16's at this stage.
3. Draw a square of area 9. They are starting to think either "This is going to be easy" or "He's up to something" depending on how well they know me.
4. Draw a sqaure of ares ... wait for it (they'll be storming ahead with 16 if they're anything like my usual lot).... draw a square of area 10.

At this point you tend to get the stunned silence, followed by some frantic scribbling. Some clever so and so will root 10, and try to do that. "Exactly 10" usually stops them.

It's worth a play, but here's my offering - and indeed I usually have to show them the answer...

I find I need to show them the 'proof' of its area. My usual method is the Big Square around the outside, take away the triangles....

A = 16 - 4 * (0.5 * 3 * 1) = 10.

I find having a notation for labeling squares handy. This one I'd call 3_1. (To move long an edge you go along 3, down 1, etc).

So - what squares can you draw? Area 20? Area 14? Are there any you cannot do?

Whats great is that you can check their answers really quickly. You'll either see the answer really instantly, or you'll do the algebra with square x_y, and go "Oh - yeah".

Enjoy. Good for Shape / Area work, and for Algebra.

Homework & blogging

As many of you know I set up a school departmental blog last week (thanks to everyone who helped give me dots all over my globe). Kids response has been broadly positive, but I still want them to write more and me to write less.

Ukedchat last week was about homework, and I also went on our County Maths Subject Leaders day. All of that conspired to set up the activity below...

I used the new Bowland PD module (The new resources look brilliant) about sharing, setting up the activity in a very similar way to the teacher on the video (but I had 30 children, not 14!).

Here's the activity...I then set the homework bearing in mind some of the comments from Thursday's UKEdchat.


(We use www.plannerlive.com for all our homeworks).

Here are the results...



I'm reasonably happy with the results. If you want to comment on my pedagogy, feel free to comment here.
If you want to comment on their results, Y9 would be so chuffed. That blog is at www.jbsmaths.blogspot.com

Teachmeet Bath Spa

My first teachmeet was such buzz.

There's too much going on in my head to properly blog it all, but what a lot of ideas!

It was great to meet so many people that I feel I know but had never met (Sally, Nicky, Emma, Donna, Clare, & bet I've missed someone here). It was great to see colleagues I had persuaded to come along to see ideas, and I'm looking forward to talking about how to use all these fab resources.

I also presented - twice. I think it went down reasonably well, I talked about how fab twitter is, and in a separate demo showed how to use a webcam as an effective visualiser.

Would I go again? Definitely. Would I present again? Absolutely.

I will struggle to get too far afield, with school and family commitments, but will keep my eyes open.

For a much better summary of the content, I'd suggest Emma Asprey's blog from the evening.
http://mustardlearning.com/2011/02/07/teachmeet-bath-spa-university/

For those interested, here is my prez...

Twitter @ School

I presented (albeit 5minutes) at our eLearning group tonight. My brief was to talk about how I use twitter. At the end of my bit (I had to shoot off - an 8 year old's birthday - more than my lifes worth to be late) I promised to send some links around about what I'd said.

I've now decided to send one link - this blog - with all my ideas in it. This is primarily for school people, but may be of interest to others.

My personal use of twitter.

1, Why I tweet. An early blog post of mine. It's at http://chrismaths.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-i-tweet.html

2, How to set up a PLN (Personal Learning Network). Also on this blog. http://chrismaths.blogspot.com/p/how-to-set-up-your-pln.html

3, #Ukedchat (see http://ianaddison.net/?p=288 or http://ukedchat.wikispaces.com/ for details

4, Networking. I'm the only timetabler in school, so where do i go to talk to other timetablers. It's also a place to talk to teachers from other phases - primary, tertiary, etc..

School Use.

1, I've got a school twitter account. It's at http://twitter.com/JBSMaths It's the one I share with students.

2, I have strict (but positive) guidelines on how it is used. All of this can be found by going to my new dept blog - http://jbsmaths.blogspot.com/p/twitter.htmltml

Hootsuite lets me see what students write, when and only when they @mention my acc. So far this has been a very successful technique. Below is an exmaple of what I see on hootsuite...

Whilst I could read all their tweets, i really have no desire to!

Anything I need to add?