I’ve been thinking a lot about misconceptions recently and also revisited a couple of old posts looking for stuff to use for revision when I came across my revision mat idea ( HERE ) that was produced using ideas that were “twitter-sourced” and it has got me thinking. I really want to get students exploring ways in which they can check their answers using strategies such as changing decimals to fractions to see if the process for “multiplication” that they have applied still works or trying different (simpler?) numbers and again, exploring if the rule they have applied still works.
I am a bit dubious about deliberately using “wrong” answers as I really don’t want to leave the students thinking that any of the “wrong” answers are actually correct so it needs to be delivered really carefully. I’m thinking that after the students have attempted to work out which two are the correct answers – we’ll discuss generally what strategies they are using (with a view to developing a list of “checking your answer strategies”) that they can then use to prove that the answers are correct/incorrect in a more formal way by sticking each one in their book and showing around it what the correct answer is (that’s the first thing I’d like them to come up with themselves is that you attempt the question yourself **fingers crossed**) and also show what they can do to show that they’ve tested the answer stands up to scrutiny.
Anyway that’s my plan .. we’ll see! Now this is where the “crowd-sourcing” comes in: If you have any misconceptions you think I should add to a later worksheet – I’m thinking that this could be a type of worksheet that each year group could get every so often (it’ll be good to embed the practice of proving/disproving an answer into year 7 early too) please leave me a comment below with any common misconceptions or mail me: mel@justmaths.co.uk
So far I’ve done 3 (UPDATED SUNDAY NIGHT 1st March!! … so you may need to download correct versions!) :
