Wednesday 15 February 2012

Maths resources - algebra and Utah interactives

Found these matchbox resources from my ME830 maths course - while reading Listening Counts.

They are a great way of introducing the unknown in a simple and unchallenging way.  Very clever.

Also stumbled onto these manipulatives - looks like a huge range of resources for interactive whiteboard use or class blogs.  would be great if they were easily embeddable.

Here's the classic towers of Hanoi puzzle.

Saturday 4 February 2012

Great link for web tools

Here are some brilliant tools for the web.

Would add lucidcharts though.

Poetry on Slideshare

Just finishing a 2 week unit on imagery in poems and the class have done a great job of using similes.

I like teaching poetry partly because you don't need to write so much so, in terms used on the MAST maths course, it is a lower threshold activity. They used to call this lower barriers to entry in my Degree Economics course. Again, similar to my MAST activities which were rich tasks, it is definitely a high threshold activity, allowing children to soar when they get the bug!

Our home learning in class this week is to write a poem. Last week 29 out of 33 children handed in their project home learning with an incredible range of presentation styles. Have extended the deadline again this week to just over 2 weeks to allow a slower, more thoughtful, and hopefully higher quality end product. I was reminded of the great slideshare site with its enormous range of slides.
Here is a great teacher resource if you want to save some time teaching a number of poetry styles:

 Here is one I'll also post to the class blog.