This is gonna be quick … I promise! But thought I’d share …

I see part of my job in year 7 is to get students comfortable just playing around with numbers. Yes, I want there to be no fear about making mistakes but I also want students to be numerate and as I say to them we’re just “playing with sums” – there is nothing to be afraid of. Of course, I also want them to develop other traits like curiosity, tenacity and resilience and also skills like being able to work systematically without giving up but I know that I can teach them almost anything if they want to be learning maths in the first instance. I’m not saying its a pre-requisite … it just makes the whole process of learning maths enjoyable and who wouldn’t want that?

Anyway, this week we have celebration evening and because of rehearsals I’ve lost a few kids in some of my lessons making it tough to launch into a new topic (I’m not complaining – I can live with it!) but it has meant that I’ve still wanted to use the time productively which is why we’ve been doing puzzles as a “way in” before spending some time consolidating some of the prior learning from this year through short sharp exercises or tasks. Incidentally, if you like puzzles check out krazydads site.

The other site I use quite a bit for ideas is nrich – this week started one lesson with this maze 100 puzzle which they did quite quickly as I expected them to and then they went onto produce their own puzzle using whatever operations they wanted to … one of my students produced this for negative numbers and I love it …  and yes we know it should be “beat my record” but myself and Joe agreed that we’d read this bit with a funny accent and it’ll be fine! 

Fab work Joe! (he did agree I could share!)