Further to my other post about teaching fractions I thought I’d share something that may be of use for revision “fractions” as a complete topic.

Whilst writing the previous post I came across something that I used with a previous teaching group (I’ve tidied it up from its previous incarnation when it was just for my use!) a few years ago … I used to have “fraction Friday” with a year 9 group to overcome two issues: The first issue was the usual issue of retention that we experience with so many topics but the second (more importantly) was to overcome a reluctance to work with fractions to make the “sums” easier – for me, having a fluency with fractions, integers and decimals makes accessing other higher order topics so much easier but I’ve always found that there is an inherent fear of fractions so I always try to “big” them up.

So whilst sharing the resulting worksheet I thought I’d also share my thinking when I originally put this sheet together and it’ll also force me to run with the idea and produce some more of the same format specifically for revision in year 11. The idea came about (and I’ve spoken about this at some of the collaborative network meetings) because I’ve an ambition one day to “crowd-source” an “end to end” series of questions for loads of topics whereby through twitter loads of people could discuss and agree on specific questions to use to model a topic and what the next question would be for students to “do” to maximise learning with the students making little cognitive jumps and not massive ones which risk losing students along the way. Ideally, taking a topic from its simplest to most complex manifestation that we could hop on and off the journey along that topic depending on the context of the students that we each teach .. maybe one day I’ll have time to do this but I have a day job to consider too! I hope that makes sense … it sounds much more exciting and useful in my head!

So my thought process originally went a little like the below image – I keep a file on my iPad that is a running commentary to myself of ideas and stuff that I just make notes about. Sometimes its just a “doodle” too!! The reason that this is crossed out with yellow lines is that anything I’ve done I cross out but don’t delete as it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see what I’ve actually done!

From this original idea came this fractions worksheet (image shown at the top of this post) -> Fractions 2 – All Skills – Revision

Following this I wrote the below note to myself looking at what other topics I could use this kind of thing for – again, these are just my notes but will give you an insight into my thought process when putting worksheets together. It’s not just throwing some questions together (OK .. sometimes it is!) I actually like to think I’m putting them together with a great deal of thought as to what I’m trying to achieve. The fact that this was 18 months ago and I still haven’t got around to taking this further shows how ambitious I am about what can be achieved!!

The below images show some other topics that I (at some point) have taken this a stage further and given some thought to the progression of the questions within each topic … all I need now is time to get them done!