Last week the boy I’m helping out with maths explored the vocabulary of 2d shapes. Here is a poster we planned together. What is a Polygon?

I once enquired of the Head of Curriculum of a school why she thought the Yr 5 & 6 cohort had no real understanding of what Division actually was. Her reply told me a fair bit.

‘You know how it is Adrian, by the time you do Addition in Term One, Subtraction in Term Two and Multiplication in Term Three those last 10 weeks of school just get too busy to do Division properly.’

I believe the modern term all the cool kiddies are using is WTF

That said, I’m trying to pull a friend’s child back from the abyss that is Math Anxiety. We’ve been ‘exploring’ & ‘playing’ with maths concepts.  We’ve done heaps with metacognition/self talk, error analysis, heaps of demonstrations with concrete materials & practise moving from concrete to symbolic representations then we put together the comic strip above.

I’m fond of ‘enforced creativity’ as a way of producing unique ideas. We took the PC version of Comic Life (yes one does exist) and a pretty random set of machinima images from my Dawn of War collection and dropped them into the program. We then started brainstorming ideas for how we could create a comic about Division. NB the last speech bubble is a little tongue in cheek as my student knows that beyond simple division most of us use a calculator

cheers

Adrian

Oh, & I’ll deal with this comment another day ‘Adrian, that’s all just ‘bells and whistles’. ‘Real’ teachers ‘don’t have time’ to do stuff like that. We have a ‘test’ to ‘cram’ for’.

Aussie High School Math teacher Marc Liddell has been experimenting with Xtranormal for and in his Maths classes. He sent me this animation to check out.

How might you use this tool in Maths investigations? Instruction? Tutorial? Reinforcement? Error Analysis? Assessment? Motivation? Building positive attitudes towards Maths as Art?

Oh and I almost forgot Marc will be in Lorne next week running a workshop called Maths is So Boring – How to Change the Attitude of our Students Through the Use of Technology – I’m hoping to make it to that one.

GoAnimate.com: Polygon Mystery by Demanter

I like using animation tools with students to reinforce maths concepts. I also like having them choose the concept they think they ‘need’ to reinforce.

Thanks for the inspiration Marc Liddell

At some point in history each of these buildings have claimed the title of ‘World’s Tallest Building’. This code breaking activity has the students work out a few interesting facts about these buildings by deciphering roman numerals.

Just finished off a page on the roman numerals site that outlines some of the statistics of the Collosseum. Wow!!!

eg Roman records show that during one particular festival, held in CCXL CE, a staggering: MM gladiators; LXX lions; XL wild horses; XXX elephants; XXX leopards; XX wild asses; XIX giraffes; X elks; X hyenas; X tigers; I hippopotamus & I rhinoceros were killed.

The idea of the site is to make pretty dull topic a little more engaging

Where in the curriculum do we just say ‘WOW’? Where do we say, ‘Hey this is new’? Where do we say, ‘You know what, this is interesting. Let’s just have a look at it’?

Please don’t wait for an opportunity to ‘integrate’ stuff. Just do it!

This is a Gömböc

I’ve just finished a couple of posters for the lil guy I’m working with on the difference between prisms and pyramids. You can print this pyramid poster out A4 from my site. There are also ten other maths posters on the page which were viewed 11 506 during October. Feel free to see if you can use them.

I’m currently doing a favour for a friend of mine and working with her son because the lad is ‘beating himself up’ about his maths knowledge.

Here is a game I’ve made for him that encourages him to reflect on how mental computation is often more efficient than using a calculator. NB Over the years I’ve found that adding a little ‘competition’ with boys often provides them with a little extra motivation to learn the basic facts than constant worksheets

Download Beat the Calculator

Over the last week or so I’ve been reading a book by Matt Groening  (The Simpsons Handbook: Secret Tips from the Pros) and tonight is my first experiment with drawing a character with an overbite