September 2015 - A New Adventure!

In September I will be starting a new job as Assistant Curriculum Leader for Maths at my local Community College. Having come from a school with only about 700 kids where I was Numeracy Co-ordinator to a school almost twice the size where I have much more responsibility is both exciting and daunting!
Although I don't yet know much about my role I know I am in charge of intervention which will mainly involve Wave 1 teaching, PPG and data. With that in mind I am beginning to consider things I want to establish both within the department and within my teaching over the next year (as well as getting used to a new school of course!). I would also like to blog a bit more (I managed 5 posts last academic year!) and really make the most of links with  Emily my successor at my old school, and with my old mentee and friend Sophie's school.

Numeracy Ninjas
The most exciting thing I have come across so far is Numeracy Ninjas. Created by @Maths_Master this is the perfect solution to tracking KS3 Numeracy and identifying students who need more support and getting that wave 1 intervention off to a great start. What I love even more about it is that it is completely free! All of the resources are there ready to use and teachers have the choice about the frequency of sessions they wish to carry out with their classes each week. Like Times Table Rockstars students are timed which creates a competitive element to the activity which students find much more engaging. Students achieve a 'ninja belt' depending on their score:

As they improve their score they go up a belt. What I would like to do is get staff to carry out the first session with all their KS3 classes (only Y7 and 8 in this school) and report that data back to me which I will collate as a baseline. After this they will have the flexibility to 'train' their classes and once a term report their scores back to me so I can identify both the highest achieving students and also the most improved students and reward them with some of the fantastic resources and prizes on the website. I am currently a bit unsure how I am going to collate the results as the number of students is much greater in this school than I am used to and know from experience I don't want to spend all of my time trawling through lots of data. 

As well as rewarding success and progress this should also help identify individual and class needs, and staff can then use the Ninja Skill Books to 'train up' their students where needed. I am ready to pitch this idea to my new HoD so fingers crossed!

iDoceo

Another challenge at my new school is the use of iPads in lessons. I already have my shiny new iPad Air 2 which I have purchased through the school's salary sacrifice scheme but although I own an iPhone and an older iPad I am feeling a bit apprehensive about using the iPads 'for the sake of using them'. Saying that I am eager to develop effective ways of using and integrating the iPads into lessons and sharing this with my department. One App I have come across which I just love is iDoceo which is basically a gradebook App. I think my new school use this anyway as I recognise the seating plan element from my interview. What I like most about it is the way you can link parents' email addresses to students in the class then take photos of student work and send it home. There is a brilliant blog article on Request a Work Selfie by @Mathed_Up which fits in beautifully with this App and makes the home/school link incredibly quick and easy if you are already using iPads in school. I'm really excited about this and can't wait to try it!

Other than reading a lot of blogs all I can really do to prepare for next year is to sort through my resources (oh and change my Notebook lessons slides over to Promethean!) and try to organise them in a logical way. I have accumulated so many excellent resources mainly through blogs and Twitter that I forget what I have, or have to trawl through lots of resources to find something that I used somewhere with some class a while back. My aim is to save this time next year by having everything clearly organised with resources I can just pick up and use. I also want to try to share more resources that I come across as I have learnt so much from so many fantastic people online that I would like to give something back!

Play Doh Pedagogy - Fractions!

Thanks to my fabulous friend and colleague Emily who attended the ATM Maths conference over the Easter holidays I have finally been introduced to how Play Doh can be used in Maths!

Today we trialed it with Year 11 middle ability students in a small group intervention sessions to add fractions with different denominators. The question was 1/3 + 4/5.

Firstly, get two different coloured Play Doh of the same amount. Each ball represents 1 whole:

Split the Pay Doh into thirds to eventually represent the 1/3 fraction, and into fifths to represent the 4/5 fraction. This helps students appreciate the fractions are different sizes as the parts of the different fractions are not the same. You can see in the image below the thirds are larger than the fifths:

Take one of the thirds (1/3), and 4 of the fifths (4/5). This is what we need to add together:

But you can see the fractions are different sizes. Firstly, we need to split all of the Play Doh into equal parts so to get them all the same size we split into fifteenths:

Once the thirds have been split into fifteen, we need to divide these fifteen into three groups again; 5 in each group. We need 1/3 of these which is equivalent to 5/15 (see above). The fifths also are split into fifteenths but in this case we need four out of the 5 groups (12/15).

We now have the sum 5/15 + 12/15, and all the balls are the same size, so we can add them together to make 17/15:

You can see we have 12 pink balls of Play Doh, and 5 blue balls of Play Doh. You can also see we have the left over fifteenths at the top. The three pink fifteenths can be swapped with three of the blue fifteenths as they are all the same size, meaning we have used all of the pink fifteenths which represents a whole one:

The answer is then one whole (represented by the pink Play Doh), and leftover we have 2 fifteenths:

This is how using Play Doh 1/3 + 4/5 = 17/15 = 1 1/15! It was great to hear the Year 11 students saying "I think I understand this now" as they could see what was happening with the fractions and gained an appreciation of their different sizes.