Sunday 22 May 2011

Do what you like...

An extract from this weeks Monday Morning Maths Memo (shortened to Monday Notes, or M4)



For the rest of this year, with year 9, our proposal is “Do what you like”.


Seriously.



No one is suggesting term 6 is filled with DVD lessons or colouring.


Obviously.

Lessons need to be Learning Goal led, and jam packed with good mathematical learning, but we would like to give you the freedom to teach everything and anything maths like. For me a useful catchphrase for this is “Excite, Engage, Enthuse”. In quick conversations, we’ve come up with the following ideas…

Lalage—Playing with numbers. For example learning cancelling shortcuts when multiplying fractions, but also interesting facts like 1111111112=12345678987654321

Steve—Functional Maths—Using the OCR and Edexcel functional papers as learning activities.

Chris—International lessons. I’ve still got diosplay on my boards from an old top set y9 from “The Swiss Challenge”, including critical path analysis, and complex numbers, doing work based on Euler. We have 18 of these lessons.

Monday’s entire meeting agenda is set over to discussions of all of the above, and every Tuesday briefing will be “what are you doing with Y9 this week” to encourage sharing ideas.