#MathsToday de @catrionaagg.bsky.social

I’ve found making regular #MathsToday posts really helps me to feel positive about my job. Reflecting on what has worked well that day (and not just the inevitable bad moments) is such a good habit, and one I wish I’d developed as a trainee.

And if you have seen any of my #MathsToday posts over the last few years, you’ll already have an idea of how great our shared resources are. We have lots of involvement with @vennmathshub.bsky.social too.

Plus you get to work with really lovely people, and enjoy the occasional Waffle Friday 🧇

Introducing arcs and sectors to Y10 #MathsToday

This is my last chance to post for a while - maternity leave starts on Monday!

Probability with Y12. I really like this RiSP about independent events, and this great MathsPad activity to practise the different definitions. It felt like we covered a lot in today’s lesson! #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Y8 were factorising today. First we worked backwards from some area models, and then used prime factor tiles to model some harder examples. #MathsToday

Some whiteboard questions to revise graph transformations with Y12 #ALevelMaths.
The final 3 were inspired by one of the questions from @mr-man-maths.bsky.social’s MathsConf talk, that was apparently badly answered last summer. #MathsToday

This post was perfect timing for me, because I was able to use these questions with Y8 today. It’s such a nice sequence, involving working forwards and backwards - so much more interesting than repeatedly starting from the beginning. Plus it forced them to lay their work out properly! #MathsToday

By the way, why not make your New Year’s resolution be to start sharing little things that went well in your maths lessons using #MathsToday?

Whenever I make a habit of this, it always makes me feel more positive about my job. It’s lovely to scroll through and see what everyone else is doing too.

Having some fun with area models with Y8. I love the bit where you go into negatives and it all still works! I often skip this step, but (as well as being a nice demo for negxneg=pos) it helps overcome their distrust at negative terms appearing as lengths/areas in algebraic models. #MathsToday

Had a very nice calm period 5 with Y7 doing some colouring in. I could hear the chaos of the elf game going on in the room next door and was very glad I’d gone for this instead! #MathsToday

Y8 expanding and factorising using algebra tiles. They needed a lot of practice of writing down the identity from the picture so we did loads of MWB questions like the 1st picture before the main task. (I accidentally differentiated too, by forgetting to give my strongest pair any tiles) #MathsToday

Our Y8 SOW sensibly includes recapping negative arithmetic before they start expanding brackets. This year I realised I don’t usually get them to practise negatives in the context of algebra, though, so in #MathsToday I gave them these questions to fill that gap.

Y12 started graph transformations today, so to warm up we did these function notation completion table. I had a lot of fun constructing this task, especially making the second table so that as many cells as possible could be filled.
#MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Had a lot of fun this morning watching Y13 trying to work out how to fit a normal curve to a binomial distribution #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Today we did the Teddy Bear task, and it was perfect - for the first time there was an extended period of quiet buzz in the room as they worked purposefully on a task while talking to their partner. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

undergroundmathematics.org/circles/tedd...

Today’s Y13 starter - I really like how c & d can be solved either by changing the inequality and using the original distribution, or by transforming the distribution and using the original values. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Two normal distribution tasks that worked really well in Y13 #ALevelMaths #MathsToday:

The 1st was a great informal intro to transforming variables.

The second was a good reminder that a graphical calc can’t do everything - you still have to think first, and input something it will cope with!

Used the wonderful MathsPad tangent drawing tool tool today with Y11. They loved coming up to the board to try and position the perfect tangent! Seeing this immediate, very visible, feedback before they all started drawing independently was so useful. #MathsToday

www.mathspad.co.uk/interactives...

This year I’ve ended up with the most silent Y12 class I’ve ever taught. Today I changed the seating plan and put this instruction at the top of the starter, and they actually talked to each other! #WeeklyWins #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

In #MathsToday Y13 filled this normal distribution table #ALevelMaths

I love this resource, especially when students get to the second one of the bottom row and get stuck, at which point I usually prompt them to look for where 0.7778 appears elsewhere. But today, that didn’t happen…

We’ve reached the time of year when the looky-likeys are starting to get serious for Y13FM #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

I enjoyed doing this question with Y7 #MathsToday. I need to remember to revisit this with Y8 when they start standard form - it’s exactly the way I want them to be thinking about it.

I used some of the statements from undergroundmathematics.org/quadratics/d... as a starter for Y12 before moving onto the discriminant. It was a nice excuse to get them using sliders and reasoning about graphs in order to reason about equations. #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

In lieu of grade boundaries, I showed them these histograms, of previous students grouped by the grade they ended up with. Took a bit of explaining, but I hope it helped them see what they were on track for, without me having to give them an explicit grade. #MathsToday

I was giving back mock papers in #MathsToday. I regretted reusing this slide from last year when a decent number of them started sniggering at my choice of grades. Apparently even Y11 still find this funny!

Y13 did their first set of integration looky-likeys in #MathsToday. Looking forward to lots more of this in the next few weeks!

The last one was a bit mean (I put it there to slow down the fast finishers) but they did manage it when I gave them the right substitution. #ALevelMaths

Today I realised that “integrates like” is the phrase I’ve been missing for talking about spotting the structure of an integral. #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

I thought Y7 might need a warm up to the task in the first picture, so I modelled a couple and got them to try their own numbers on MWB. Brilliantly, someone happened to get 23, 24 and 23. After such a near miss they were all very motivated to try and get a perfect triplet! #MathsToday

Really enjoyed today’s Y7 lesson: linking function machines, telling the ‘story’ of a variable, substitution and sequences, in order to generate sequences from an expression. I love these lessons when it feels like everything comes together! #MathsToday

In #MathsToday I made 40 A Level teachers colour in representations of the binomial distribution.

This is your regular reminder that if you teach #ALevelMaths you should definitely try to join your local Maths Hub’s A Level Pedagogy group. There is some brilliant stuff going on all over England.

I used this prompt with two Y8 classes today. In the 1st class their initial reactions were pretty evenly split between all the options. The 2nd class are higher-attaining mathematically, and the vast majority confidently went for £100. #MathsToday

Highlight of today was showing Y8 how they could use prime factors to simplify ratios. I was impressed that they remembered that when all the factors are cancelled out it would simplify to 1 - I was expecting most of them to write 0 #MathsToday

On Thursday I used this brilliant Don Steward task with Y11. Love the fact that the later ones use simultaneous equations too! #MathsToday

donsteward.blogspot.com/2017/03/mean...

Wednesday was a very quiet day for me, but I enjoyed playing investigators with Y7. Everyone had to write a sequence that began 10,20… and then we tried to guess the rule that they had used. #MathsToday

Tuesday’s lesson with Y12 was something no we talked about lots in last years A Level Pedagogy Work Group - the importance of explicitly teaching pupils how to sketch graphs. Was also good to teach them Desmos skills like rescaling the axes. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

On Monday I got Y13 to find the turning points of these graphs as an intro to the chain rule. Partly because I like how sketching is so much better than the ‘obvious’ expand and differentiate, but also to make the point that we can use the extra structure to our advantage. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

My favourite thing about the maths teacher community on Bluesky is #MathsToday. If you’ve not joined in before, I can really recommend it. Posting a highlight of your day is very uplifting!

I’ve kept forgetting this term, though, so going to attempt a week’s worth in one go…

Spent a slightly painful 15 minutes discussing Q2 with Y12 today. The problem wasn’t with spotting the patterns, but trying to formulate that into full sentences. If you teach #ALevelMaths, I’d be interested to know how your students get on with similar “describe and explain” tasks. #MathsToday

Taught my first #MathsToday lessons of the year! I forgot how much fun this topic is with Year 7. Today we played “guess the method from the calculation”.

I asked Y8 what they thought the typical wage was from this list and was impressed by their suggestions! They even came up with the midrange, and were pleased to find out it had a name.

Followed up with an averages classic! #MathsToday

I did pretty much the same lesson today with Y10, although much quicker. It worked really well - we were able to recap all the index laws they knew and explain why they work, and then move onto negative and fractional powers. #MathsToday

My Y12 FM class have finished all the content for this year, so there’s time for some fun problem-solving! In #MathsToday we did this great rationalising task. undergroundmathematics.org/polynomials/...

Any suggestions for other activities I could use? Your favourite UM tasks, perhaps?

Y8 are doing area, so I got to use the ‘plan without numbers’ approach for compound area that worked so well last year. This year’s class are much more confident, but still struggled at first to describe what the purpose of their calculations were, rather than just the mechanics of it. #MathsToday

Y9 have been moving from frequency trees to probability trees. This sequence worked really well on MWB where they could change their previous answer each time - I’d definitely teach it this way again #MathsToday

A #MathsToday catch-up post: here are some of the things I’ve done this week.

Y10 learned about recurring decimals, so I used this Don Steward task (reformatted to remove fractional indices). I didn’t realise how nice the answers would be! donsteward.blogspot.com/2017/02/recu...

In Y9 #MathsToday I introduced the formulae for speed and density.
First we did some ratio table practice and I emphasised how it’s useful to draw in a multiplier starting from 1.
Then I removed the numbers and asked them to set up the tables again, then put in multipliers to get the formulae.

After our success using ratio tables for percentages and similar shapes, I was looking forward to teaching compound measures to Y9. But some of them have struggled much more than I expected to put the numbers in the right place, particularly remembering to give speed its own row. #MathsToday

Properties of quadrilaterals with Y8. They sort of know this all already but it still always seems like a bit of a slog!

Today we did everything on this hierarchical diagram rather than as a list, which I hope made it seem more logical. #MathsToday

Revising the intersections of planes with Y12 FM. A couple of them were really thrown by Q2&3 having the same answer! #MathsToday

Solving one problem in multiple ways has turned out to be quite an effective way to convince Y8 to write down their reasons. #MathsToday

Y12 are revising for internal exams next week, so in #MathsToday I made them come up with a plan of action for some questions. It was interesting trying to get them to be specific about what they were actually going to do, e.g. "I'd start by finding the identity" - how? - "well I'd draw a table"

Haven't done a Y9 trig update in a while, so here's the last three lessons' worth of #MathsToday:

First we learnt how to label the sides, so that it was easier to identify which multipler to use when the triangles aren't in the same orientation.

This is always one of my favourite #ALevelMaths lessons - introducing infinite geometric series. Y12 surprised me this year by generally preferring a geometric approach over algebraic tricks - usually it’s the other way round! #MathsToday

More Y9 trig #MathsToday: we ditched the tables in favour of drawing multipliers directly onto the triangles. This lesson went pretty well! Still just using sin and cos, and today I kept everything in one orientation as well.

For the next stage of our trig lessons, we looked at the unit circle and introduced sine and cosine as a way to generate a reference triangle for any angle. At this stage they’re still then using similarity and ratio tables to find the missing sides. #MathsToday

I’ve decided I really like this way of thinking. It seems to me that it gets to the heart of why standard form is useful - because it tells us the size of the number we’re dealing with. And it was particularly good in today’s lesson on adding and subtracting. #MathsToday

A starter with a hidden theme for Y8, before our lesson on adding and subtracting in standard form. #MathsToday

…and then we tried some questions with different angles, including having to choose an appropriate reference triangle. #MathsToday

Inspired by @mathforge.org at the Easter conference, today I started teaching Y9 trig by using similarity to reference triangles. #MathsToday

I thought my class would need extra scaffolding so we started by using one triangle in lots of orientations…

Y7 #MathsToday: how would you convince someone these two shapes have the same area?

Some other proof things I’ve been trying with them - fill the blanks and correcting my bad answers. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

I’ve been teaching proof by induction to Y12 in #MathsToday (and last week, but I’ve not been good at posting) using this proof machine analogy, which I think is great. #ALevelMaths

I observed a trainee using this activity today - students have to decide which supplier to use for each item. Y10 were disappointing unappreciative of the puns in some of the company names.
#MathsToday

Linking ratio and algebra with Y10 #MathsToday

Y12 have found proof by contradiction really hard! We did some practice at just writing down the opposite statement first (pink in first 2 pics), and then I’ve been scaffolding the proofs fairly heavily.
Does anyone have a good bank of examples for more practice?
#ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Looking for different strategies in Y8 #MathsToday. I was impressed that one of them knew that they could do 50% of 36 for the second question!

This kept Y13 busy for a while. Can you guess what (FM) topic we were starting today? #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Y9 have struggled with enlargements over a couple of lessons before the holidays. Today I was much more consistent with my use of colour and it felt like we finally got somewhere. #MathsToday

A Y8 asked a great question at the end of this task. They’d noticed that all the answers were the sum of two other numbers in the question, and asked if that would always be true. So we tested it on other examples that fitted the same structure, including fractional values. #MathsToday

Tried the same trick with vectors today. In hindsight I probably could have chosen a more interesting example - I found it harder to write the prompts for this one.
#ALevelMaths
#MathsToday

To introduce logarithmic scales with #CoreMaths, we looked at this graph from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com, and then at his explanation for the scale. I really like this example of a log scale in the wild! #MathsToday

Another same&different activity with Y8. I think they were surprised that there turned out to be more the similarities than differences. #MathsToday

I was finally organised enough to write out a worked solution in advance rather than doing it live. I think this worked well - need to do it more often! #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Y8 #MathsToday: we extended the tables downwards, and they pretty quickly realised they could use the numbers they could see in order to evaluate these. We even managed negative fractional indices!

Honestly this way of teaching indices is a game changer. Thanks @blatherwicksam.bsky.social

On the hunt for right angled triangles in Y9 #MathsToday

Today we used the power tables for some impressive-looking non-calculator work, followed by trying to spot a shortcut that we can use when we don’t have a table. #MathsToday

Started indices in Y8 #MathsToday.

Our previous topic was sequences, so we began by comparing two that I’d made in a spreadsheet.

And then we moved onto power tables, using the jumps method that I stole from @blatherwicksam.bsky.social. By the end of the lesson they were using fractional powers!

Y8 sequences in #MathsToday. This sequence of questions was great!

In hindsight I would have made the numbers in Q2 easier though. They weren’t really ready for anything too non-standard by the time they got to these ones. #MathsToday

Started pythagoras with Y9 in #MathsToday. I really like these questions that start with areas of squares, and gradually remove the squares until it’s just side lengths. Would highly recommend @drrowlandson.bsky.social’s blog post about this approach ponderingplanning.wordpress.com/2022/10/15/t...

Some #MathsToday from the second A Level Pedagogy work group meeting with 10 other teachers from Essex. The theme was using graphing technology - I particularly liked learning how to use a graphical calculator!

This task was a fun one. How would you answer? #ALevelMaths

Last year my Y8s needed a lot of help turning these hopping questions into an nth term, so I’d prepared a lot of scaffolding for #MathsToday. This year I have a stronger class generally, and they saw the connection right away! So we did some working backwards from other starting points.

Haven’t actually taught any #MathsToday myself, but I enjoyed a moment in a trainee’s lesson when a student looked at these rules for arguments and said “wait a minute, is this just logarithms?”
#ALevelMaths

A hastily-written starter for Y7 that turned into a great activity. Incredibly, some of them apparently hadn’t noticed until the challenge that there was anything special about the digits in the questions! Checking who was closest meant even more practice for everyone 😄
#MathsToday

Exposed a misconception about the graph of y=tan x with Y12 today, using this problem from undergroundmathematics.org/trigonometry...

Almost everyone’s first attempt to sketch a tan graph was too flat, which meant they got the first inequalities the wrong way round.
#MathsToday #ALevelMaths

I have been using @sudeepgkr.bsky.social's repeated change applet (and question generator) in #CoreMaths recently. Today we moved onto AER and APR, using the same structure. Lots of students don't need to draw the table every time, but it's great scaffolding for when they're unsure. #MathsToday

#MathsToday

Possibly my favourite lesson of #MathsToday was Y10 doing their 2nd lesson on this urban regeneration project: amsp.org.uk/resource/9cd...

Today they created and then presented posters of their proposals. I’m usually allergic to group work so this was well out of my comfort zone, but they were fab!

In our department meeting on Wednesday, we had some time to work in groups in order to make improvements to our shared lesson resources. My group decided our #ALevelMaths lessons need more completion tables! Then in Y12 #MathsToday I got to use this one that my colleague had made.

I used to encourage students to highlight F or Z shapes for parallel lines questions, but today I just told Y9 to highlight the transversal. It’s an easier first step, and they were almost always then able to immediately see what to do next.

Also, I love these MathsPad questions!

#MathsToday

I think these bar models are quite a useful way of thinking about energy questions. Your pot of energy can be split between KE and GPE, and might grow or shrink if work is being done by or against a force. I tend to get some of my signs mixed up unless I draw something! #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

More brilliant Don Steward tasks for Y8. What makes these resources even better is the interactive version: www.geogebra.org/m/h3yNN4U8 - thanks @johngolden.bsky.social!
#MathsToday

I love Don Steward’s exercises which have a pattern in the answers. Easy to check, students quickly spot the pattern so can self-correct as they go, instant extension activity in trying to write the next question. This one was perfect practice for Y8 in #MathsToday

Percentages of an amount with Y7, using the excellent MathsPad percentages bar www.mathspad.co.uk/i2/teach.php...
#MathsToday

For Y9’s last lesson on percentages, we did some mixed problems about money. I was surprised by how difficult they found these, especially Q1 - lots of them couldn’t decide whether they needed to add on the £42 or subtract it. #MathsToday

Now 5 lessons into percentages with Y9. We are still using tables, but now with multipliers. Today we did some repeated change problems by adding extra sections to the table. #MathsToday

Y13 have been revising recurrence relations this week, so another opportunity for looky-likeys #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Started percentages with Y9 in #MathsToday. We were focusing on different types of problems that can be solved with ratio tables.

Very little #MathsToday for me - only Y13 were in school in order to give everyone time to mark and moderate Y11 mocks. This is a new thing for us this year (we also had a day in November, and one coming up in March for Y13 mocks) and it’s been brilliant for reducing workload and associated stress!

Differential equation looky-likeys for Y13. Several were caught out by Q4! #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

In Y12 #MathsToday I used this completion table (stolen off a colleague). It was such a good task. I really think having to work forwards and backwards helps to embed the routine more than just completing the procedure 4 times starting at the beginning. #ALevelMaths

Introducing the idea of simplifying surds to Y9. We started by talking about the difference between approximate and exact answers, and then did this task (adapted from @giftedhko.bsky.social) which worked really well.
#MathsToday

Had to do an impromptu extra whiteboard activity with Y7 in #MathsToday, after a significant proportion wrote that ⅓ was bigger than ⅔. I’ve known students think ½ < ⅓ and can understand where that might come from, but today’s was a new one on me.

Y12 are starting to solve recurrence relations. I used this to introduce the idea of a general solution #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Followed this up in the next lesson with 6(2x-4) divided by 2. Much higher success rate overall, but I was very pleased that a student who was absent on Wednesday made the classic mistake so we could discuss why it doesn’t work. #MathsToday

In #MathsToday a student quoted Osborn’s rule as “when you see a squared sinh, you flip that sign”

Obviously only works for certain pronunciation, but I like it!

Y7 number lines: if I tell you the end numbers, what are the others?

They found this much more difficult than I expected - most could ‘see’ simple scales, but found it really hard to articulate a process when the numbers got more difficult.
#MathsToday

Thank you to everyone who has been sharing moments from your first week back using #MathsToday. Reading so many enthusiastic posts about maths teaching has definitely helped me get through what’s felt like a long week! Happy Friday everybody 😁

This very nice sequence of example-problem pairs on arithmetic series (gleefully stolen from @mayorofsimpleton.bsky.social) worked really well with Y12 #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Applications of simultaneous equations might be my favourite topic. There are just so many fun problem types! We did these Don Steward beauties in Y10 #MathsToday.

A Y8 student claimed to have made 20 in part (b), which made for an interesting reasoning task as the others tried to prove that it couldn’t be done. Eventually we concluded that it was only possible to get three different answers, and none of these were 20.
#MathsToday

Trying to get into the habit of using more topic maps in my lessons. Here are two from #MathsToday with Y10 and Y13. #ALevelMaths

I started volumes of revolution with Y13 today. I’d forgotten how hard the stacked cylinders are to sketch - I definitely should have practised drawing it in advance. This version took me several attempts and still isn’t quite right. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Multiplying by 10s on MWB with Y7 #MathsToday. Lots of them were caught out by 1.03x10. Answers included 1.3, 10.03 and 13.3

If you teach maths (at any level), why not join in with #MathsToday this term? The idea is to share a little thing from your classroom - doesn’t have to be polished or original. You can join in occasionally or aim to post something every day. I’ve found it a great way to focus on the positives!

I have #MathsToday and #ALevelMaths pinned as feeds, and I enjoy checking those - I’ve end up seeing lots more posts about day-to-day maths teaching here than I used to on Twitter. My enthusiasm for posting lagged a bit at the end of term but I’m determined to get back into it next week!

I’ve ended up with a few spare lessons with Y8 (unknown for me, I’m usually behind!) so we’ve been doing investigations. They came up with loads of things I’d never thought of! I particularly liked one student’s justification of why even squares appear in square numbered rows. #MathsToday

A significant chunk of Y10 included the Eiffel Tower in their diagram for this question, and then couldn’t see the right angle! We had to have a chat about abstraction and what a good diagram looks like. It was also a good opportunity for a Plan Without Numbers. #MathsToday

I didn’t have a Y12 lesson for #MathsToday because they were all at Maths Inspiration. Very jealous that they got to see cool people like @ayliean.bsky.social @sparksmaths.bsky.social without me!

Y13 did some hard substitutions in #MathsToday. They found this really difficult - lots of them aren’t yet fluent enough with trig identities. They know them when asked directly, but can’t always spot them in the wild, or anticipate where one could be made to usefully appear. #ALevelMaths

Trying a bit of “what if” on MWB with Y10 #MathsToday. Did a question, then I changed a number and got them to make changes to their solution, then made another change etc. It worked ok, although I should have found a better way of showing it on the board.

Thank you to whoever suggested this set of looky-likeys. I enjoyed using them with Y13 #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

One of the things we talked about yesterday was the importance of checking #ALevelMaths students know what makes a good sketch.

So in #MathsToday I showed Y8 what good and bad sketches look like. I then plotted some graphs on @desmos.com and got them to sketch on MWB. Might as well start early!

Y10 are doing trig. There’s so much hidden decision-making in this topic! I really like the topic maps that @mayorofsimpleton.bsky.social has made and am trying to show these every lesson, as well as annotating examples with what I’m thinking. #MathsToday

An absolute classic for Y9 #MathsToday. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so engaged on a Wednesday afternoon.

Today’s looky-likeys were all trigonometric #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Half of Y7 were missing for a PSHE event so the rest of us did some algebra tile puzzles #MathsToday

#MathsToday

Today’s looky-likeys for further #ALevelMaths. The third one caught a lot of them out! #MathsToday

#MathsToday is fairly active (although often skews KS5 - it would be great to have more posts from other key stages) and is my favourite part of this community. It feels like a lot more people share lesson ideas & reflections here than I used to see on Twitter

While recapping inequalities with Y10 #MathsToday I realised something that I can’t believe hadn’t occurred to me before: the open/closed circles are 🔍 zooming in to show whether the line exists at that point. We could draw circles anywhere, but it’s usually only the end points we’re unsure of.

More integration looky-likeys with Y13 Further #ALevelMaths

A student tried to do the first one with partial fractions and was very disappointed when he realised he was back where he started 😂
#MathsToday

Third lesson on #ALevelMaths normal distribution - we finally got to doing calculations! #MathsToday

I’ve set them the inverse normal worksheet for homework because we ran out of time. Hoping they’ll be able to get the links in the bottom row, but I’m expecting to have to talk about that next week.

I’m aware my #MathsToday posts have been very KS5 focused recently, so here’s what Y8 have been doing today.

We talked about how strange it was to turn an equation into a picture of all possible solutions, and then tried to draw some. This lesson went really well - they were loving it.

Second lesson on normal distribution with Y13 #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Today we mostly focused on modelling, using a card sort that they then had to write on. This part of the lesson took much longer than I expected! It was a good opportunity to talk about continuity corrections, though.

Vectors with Y12 #ALevelMaths (although this is technically Y13 content)

I’m trying to include more of the “See this? Think this!” stuff in my lessons this year, especially for A Level
#MathsToday

I really like this way of introducing histograms - from Y12 #CoreMaths #MathsToday

Representations of vectors with Y12. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Welcome! There’s lots of good maths discussion here, particularly using #MathsToday to share daily snippets from maths lessons.

At lunchtime today I was working through some of these problems with three Oxbridge candidates. It’s a brilliant resource. It’s also nice doing problems where they often solve them before I do! #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

First lesson on the normal distribution with Y13. I love this lesson! Lots of reasoning just using area under a curve + symmetry, rather than typing numbers into a calculator.

Q7 is my favourite. I think I should have made Q8&9 harder for this class though.
#ALevelMaths #MathsToday

#MathsToday was the lesson I’d most been looking forward to this year. I was teaching Y13 - can anyone guess the topic?

Revising different possibilities for integration with Y13 #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Odds and evens with Y9 #MathsToday. Last year they found this kind of selective factorising quite hard, so this year I’ve taught it as a separate skill before we start using it to write proofs.

Hi new maths teacher followers! One of the best things we do here is share little bits of our maths lessons using #MathsToday. It doesn’t have to be an incredible new idea - just a little positive snippet from your day. Please join in, I’d love to know what you’ve been up to today!

Started our statistics topic with Y12 #CoreMaths with a notice&wonder activity. Also a good opportunity to reuse my favourite visual for populations and samples. #MathsToday

A Y8 student excitedly told me today that he’d found “a way to multiply any two numbers without using multiplication”. Here’s his demonstration of 8x4. I was impressed enough not to argue about whether squaring should count as multiplication! #MathsToday

I’m teaching fraction multiplication and division to Y8. Several of them already know a rule, so I’m trying to set them tasks that make them think a bit more about the method they’re using. #MathsToday

Hyperbolic graphs with Y13 - a good excuse to talk to them about general sketching techniques. I think they quite enjoyed realising how much they already knew about the function.
#MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Y12 did lots of percentage questions in today’s starter, all generated from BossMaths’s applet bossmaths.com/r16a/. I really like the table layout for this kind of thing.
It also worked well later in the lesson when we tried to calculate by how much Freddos had overtaken CPI. #CoreMaths #MathsToday

Anyone want to guess what proportion of Y13 FM tried to do the third integral by parts?
#MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Fractions starter for Y8 #MathsToday

Trying to continue my derivatives-are-paler colour scheme in today’s notes #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Started writing a flowchart and then decided it would make more sense as a rectangle. Not sure Y11 were entirely convinced by it though! #MathsToday

I’ve always been a fan of flow charts and other word diagrams, especially for #ALevelMaths. In #MathsToday I tried to use an example alongside, which I think worked quite well.

Demand curves with #CoreMaths #MathsToday. I don’t really understand why lots of the examples plot price against demand, but then ask for the optimum selling price. Surely if the selling price is what you can control, this should be on the horizontal axis?

Lots of factorising fun as a warm up to using standard summation formulae with Y12 #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Next lesson we’re supposed to do method of differences - does anyone have ideas for nice questions that don’t use partial fractions?

Loved doing these questions with Y12. Especially Q2 😍
#ALevelMaths #MathsToday

My #CoreMaths Y12s were working on their first project today. We used to do this project in Y13 so I introduced lots of extra scaffolding this year - but it probably still needed more. #MathsToday

Started the equations block in Y9 with a recap of what we did in Y8. Last year this topic felt like a bit of a struggle at times, so I was really pleased to see how well they remembered it. #MathsToday

In Y12 #MathsToday these two activities filled the entire lesson! #ALevelMaths

Last year I found training Y13 to spot patterns like (derivative)e^(function) really helped in the integration topic. This year I’m trying to embed that earlier, as we cover differentiation. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Tried a new thing with Y12 as they’ve now finished their first topic. I got them to use their notes and the summary lists from Integral to write themselves a revision quiz. The idea is that they can use this when they come to revise to check what they remember. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Y12 sequences - we had lots of fun with MWB in this lesson. #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Was talking to Y13 about why harmonic form is useful, and it occurred to me that lots of these are the same reasons we complete the square for a quadratic. So I’m tempted to start calling this Completing The Wave #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Y7 loved this number trick! There were actual gasps when they realised they’d all got the same output #MathsToday

Another lesson of lots and lots of MWB work with Y9, who are now pretty good at finding the equation of a line from its graph 😄 #MathsToday

I’ve become a bit obsessed with the chapter on promoting graphical thinking from @susanwhitehouse.bsky.social and @mrsouthernmaths.bsky.social’s book. I reckon this one is much more accessible if your instinct is to sketch! undergroundmathematics.org/product-rule...
#MathsToday

Trying to teach Y13 good habits for writing solutions. #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

This is always one of my favourite lessons to do with Y8. #MathsToday

One of the nice things about seeing so many #MathsToday posts is realising how many of us are teaching similar topics at the same time.

In Y7 #MathsToday someone suggested a sequence where each term is the product of the previous two. I didn’t know a name for this type, so they suggested a few which we voted on - in the end Geonacci narrowly beat Fibometric.

A hastily made completion table for Y8 #MathsToday

Successfully managed to teach through a power cut with a class I’d never met before #MathsToday

I’ve been enjoying following #MathsToday and #ALevelMaths

I haven’t been in school today so my #MathsToday has been limited to setting cover work. I’m once again very grateful to @tlmaths.bsky.social for his incredible bank of videos - managed to find exactly what I needed for both Y12 and Y13.

This was another good puzzle for Y13 to practise using trig multipliers - and we derived the double angle formulae from it. Then we did some practice of the compound angle formulae, including differentiating from first principles. #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Simplifying ratios in Y8 #MathsToday provided a nice excuse to recap prime factorisation. Most common answer to the final question here was 0:18, and a few just wrote 18 on its own. Luckily we’d learnt another method we could use to check.

Connected rates of change with Y13 #MathsToday
I made these examples up fairly quickly because I wanted them to sketch the graphs, then asked them to choose some sensible values and we calculated the rates. It turned out to be a really nice progression of questions.

One more #MathsToday, this time from Y12 Further #ALevelMaths. I decided to make a big thing about equating real and imaginary parts, with finding square roots and division just applications of that. I’ll show them conjugates as a shortcut for division next time.

Really enjoyed this afternoon’s Y9 lesson. We did lots on MWBs, including some impromptu extra practice with ratio tables. I think I’ve got better at stopping the lesson like this to practise a skill in isolation, and it has a huge impact, especially on less confident classes. #MathsToday

Some different trig representations with Y13, which we could then combine to derive the compound angle formulae. I think the multipliers were a new way of thinking for a lot of them, but they work really well here and will be useful in mechanics! #MathsToday #ALevelMaths

Y7 #MathsToday was visual sequences. We did lots of MWB questions, including coming up with interesting questions to ask. I liked working backwards from the calculation to the pictures - you can see some of their Pattern 3s on the board.

I didn’t have enough exercise books for my new #CoreMaths class so needed something to keep them busy while I raided the cupboard. This turned out to be a really good question - they were able to take lots of different approaches. #MathsToday

I was pretty pleased with my attempt at explaining the chain rule today. I sometimes struggle to know how to pitch an explanation of something like this. I want them to know it’s more subtle than cancelling fractions, but don’t want to end up making it seem really difficult! #ALevelMaths #MathsToday

Had a lovely first lesson with Y12 today doing polynomial arithmetic. Only to get to the end of the day and discover a timetabling mix-up means I should have been teaching a completely different topic. Will be sad not to get to finish this!
#ALevelMaths #MathsToday

I’m in favour of something really short so it doesn’t take up too much of the character limit. Maybe #MathsToday? I’m aware that there are also some
Science people doing it and I don’t know whether we should have something more inclusive or separate the subjects out.