ACE starters and not fearing mistakes

So at my recent school, the department were extremely passionate about entry activities. These were starters that were given as students entered the room, so that they immediately had something to focus on.

They had to follow a few rules:

1. Must be printed - So that each student has something in their hand, and avoids situations where students have to keep looking up to the IWB.
2. Must have opportunity to write their name - no matter how poor the student's ability, most can fill in a name, therefore they can all be getting on straight away.
3. Should be accessible - No questions should be asked (clearly the first few times you run this, it may need some explaining, but the questions should start off as easy as possible for that class ability)
4. Should not have an end - This was tricky for me - there should never be a point where the student has finished their entry.
5. It must be worthwhile - Students won't buy into it if the teacher just bins the work later in the lesson.

At first, I was creating differentiated, thought provoking (yet easy), printable entries, for the start of all my lessons. It took me about 45 minutes to create each one, and we used it for 5 minutes a lesson. It was painful.
After many attempts, and poor ideas, I finally landed on one I liked. I call it my ACE entry.

Answer
Communicate
Extension


Each entry follows a similar pattern, answering easy questions (based on the class ability, I had ones that ranged from addition to factorising quadratics) followed by a matching activity, which helped students who liked to self check. When going through this, I quickly reeled off answers, or went round the room asking for answers. If anyone tried the "didn't get to it", I simply asked them to work it out then and came back to them in a few more questions.

Then the communicate question, which encouraged the student to communicate effectively certain definitions, or explain where a misconception has occurred. An example being "Explain why 3.4 x 10 is not 3.40"
This is great to open up debate at the start, and also push for better answers from the more advanced students:

S: because it is 34
T: why is it 34?
S2: because the numbers moved to the left.
T: What did they do wrong?
S3: added a zero instead.
T: Why did they do that?
etc etc...


Finally, the extension, which I rarely mark in lesson, but mark when looking in books. I get them to stick the A5 sheet in their books and give feedback about it. If a student is not getting enough done at the start of the lesson, I ask them to complete it as part of homework. I also value it with praise stickers that just highlight completing the entry to a high standard.

Now, there are 63 of them in this zipped file, enough to last you till Christmas at least. Only a few have repeated parts, and some are harder than others. Each one is duplicated so you can print two on one sheet easily from the print menu.

ACE Starters

Warning - I will have made mistakes on these, having made them generally between the hours of 11pm and 1am.


Which leads me to my second point. When I started teaching, one of my irrational fears was that I'd make too many mistakes on the board, as I am quite clumsy sometimes with my working.
To combat it - I faced it full on, and created Mr. Hill's Correction chart.

I make the joke that through the year I will put in mistakes, and if they can spot them then they get a point for their class (of course I never do it on purpose). I display this poster proudly on the wall. I also explain how it is fine to make mistakes and that is how we learn. My student's love catching me out and you will often hear in the middle of my class "correction!" from an over zealous student.

So embrace the many errors there may be on these entries!

Viral Mathematics - The Ice Bucket Challenge

It is important for me as a teacher that I can relate mathematics to the current world, and to a certain extent, ensure my students don't see me as some out of touch weirdo.

This year's big craze, the Ice Bucket Challenge, allows us teachers to investigate how quickly a good idea can go viral, and more importantly, raise huge amounts of money in the process.

As we prepare students to go into the new world, wouldn't it be great for them to see the potential the internet has on creating incredible amounts of fundraising, whilst also doing some maths :)

There are already some great maths posts out there about this phenomenon, including When will I get nominated?  and  How long till the whole world is nominated?

This is more about an actual lesson based on the viral campaign. It gives us a good platform to discuss powers, and for me I will use it to reinforce power notation (particularly for the weaker students)

I have tried to plan this in a way that is accessible to most secondary Mathematics' students, with a real emphasis on extension.

It is also a creative lesson, as you finish by encouraging them to create their own idea of a viral fundraising campaign and you can have them model it themselves.

The extension comes with looking at the reality that on average maybe 1.2 people actually donate out of the three nominated, for a number of reasons (been picked before, cheapskate, on holiday at the time etc..)
My gold learners (more on that soon) would incorporate that in their lesson, whilst the others would just concentrate on working out how to type "3 to the power of 6" in their calculator.

It requires some tweaking i'm sure - and if there is any advice please pass it on.

Here is the powerpoint and the word document worksheet. Please note that if you can't show a video on youtube in school, you will need to swap the video for something else, maybe a still of a celebrity getting drenched.


Resources


N.B. I am yet to be nominated. :p

Mr. Hill

Music and Maths

I love music, and every opportunity I can get it into my lessons I will. I have a theme on Mondays in school which is Music Mondays, where we will always have a music based starter activity, and if the class are well behaved, I will play music for them during the activities in the lesson.

I am pretty up to date with music as I do a variety of DJing in my own time, and tend to play stuff the students will like. I always let them request songs and make a conscious effort to play them, particularly if I haven't heard of the act before. I find that I have bonded with many previously unreachable students by just getting a glimpse of what music tastes they have.

To help with that, I created some Maths & Music starters. Now, I must point out that these are almost identical to Mr Collins' MathsDjing , and honestly only found that these existed after I had done about six of mine. I've therefore been reluctant to post about them, but I do feel that it is good to have variety and it may just be a slightly different combination to his excellent work on this.

The idea is simple, add up every number you hear in the mashup of songs. Explain that the word 'to' and 'for' are not numbers, and that 1999 is '19' and '99' because that's how you sing it. They don't say 'one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine', and if Prince did, I doubt it would have been quite as successful.

Here are my links to the starters:


Maths Music Starters


My favourite one is the joke one - after doing about six of these, then you can play this one. Don't expect an answer, just watch the expressions on the faces of the students!

I also use the Chris Moyles Quiz Night Music questions too, and normally alternate week on week between the two ideas. If anyone has other music based starter activities, I'm all ears!

I will add more every few months so check back and bookmark this page!

Real Life and Inequalities

I find it baffling that students don't see how simple linear inequalities are. The idea that they are so similar to a simple equation, just with a different symbol in the middle seems to pass all but my A grade students.

Perhaps that is the problem though, I see it as solving an equation but having a different sign in the middle. A student, who probably doesn't really get the point of algebra anyway, is not going to be won over on that weak vision of mine.

So I went about trying to relate inequalities to real life. It's actually quite easy. I often show them that we are doing something called inequalities (this works better with KS4 who have come across these symbols more often).
I then ask them to get into groups of less than four.  Most of the time you will get a question of "does that mean four as well?", to which you just repeat the same command.

Brilliant - you have them cornered - they all understand inequalities as they have just proved it. How big could the groups be? How small could they be?

Maybe go again with two parameters, maybe with an equals to, and you will get a pretty strong success rate. Suddenly the daunting topic of inequalities doesn't seem so bad.

The main activity

The Lift Problem

Next - my activity on real life inequalities. I give them a job at a company called U Raise Me Up. They produce lifts, and the job is to work out the safety parameters on each lift.

The powerpoint is fairly self explanatory, but essentially you are looking for them to consistently make links and explain the inequality that is formed when working in this real life context.

My favourite part of this activity is even before getting onto the forming and solving. Finding the average weight of humans by country is always an interesting debate, but by using Wikipedia as 'open knowledge' and spotting that there are blanks in the data, we had to do some extra maths to work out the weights of women in certain countries.

I explained that there is no wrong answer here, and I got some great independent thinking, including averaging women's weights, finding the average difference between male and female weights or comparing similar countries.

Anyway enough rambling - how could I make this activity better?