Hello Maths,

I hope you’ve had a great first week back and that the return to work hasn’t been too much of a shock to the system.  Welcome to all of the new members of the maths departments. I hope you’ve managed to find everything that you need – I feel like I’ve been asking lots of questions as I don’t know where anything is! Luckily, everyone I have approached has gone out of their way to be very helpful, so thank you to those who have been pointing us in the right direction too.

Each week my intention is to write a bulletin to make sure everyone has any dates they need, any maths deadlines that are approaching and any training that may be taking place. I also hope to address any curriculum issues that have been brought to my attention over the week from the different campuses.

If you would like anything to go in the bulletin, please email me and I’ll make sure it’s included.

Have a restful weekend, and hopefully catch up with as many of you as I can next week.

Matilde

Deadlines:

Due to the start of the year, it has taken a bit of time to set up Go 4 Schools.  Thank you to Mike and Becky who have managed to set up the Autumn 1 markbook this week in between all the first week madness!

Please can all year 7 teachers put a tick against any student who requires intervention (highlighted green in the picture below) by the end of Wednesday 14^th September.

The other boxes don’t need to be filled in yet, but instructions of how to fill them in are included in the years 7 and 8 document that Joel, Louise and Nick will have sent/given you before the holidays or on your first day back.

Curriculum Issues KS3:

Some questions that have come up this week.

• Are there any answers?

There are on some, but not all.  If you make some answers for an activity that doesn’t have any, please send them to me so I can share them with everyone. 

• There is a big jump in conceptual understanding between some of the activities for some of my classes.

Please take as long as is necessary to ensure students understand the activities and the transition to the next activity. This may sometimes mean you have to make an intermediate activity, or spent some time consolidating a skill before moving on.  This is absolutely fine, and is to be encouraged. Each ‘lesson’ isn’t necessarily a lesson long. For example, with my year 7, I wrote a comment that my class needed to spend more time practising adding and subtracting decimals, so my lesson 3 may well take several lessons.

If you make your own resources for this, please send them along so I can add them here.  If they are paid for resources, they will need to be password protected. If they have been found on the internet, please acknowledge which website they have been taken from.

• What kind of tasks should be set for homework (ALC AND WPC)?

Thank you to Katie Roper at WPC for sharing a very good homework that can be used alongside the year 8 scheme.  I think that is a great of example of the kind of homework that is useful and relevant. They could also be used as consolidation tasks if not used for homework.  Remember that you can also set MyMaths, and use the Knowledge Organisers at WPC.

 KS4:

There have been no curriculum issues raised so far – please let me know if there are any.

The markbooks in Go 4 schools will be set up to record results of the tests that are timetabled. I will remind people on here when tests are due to be taking place. These tests will be available as links on the schemes when I have written them!

KS5:

Please bear with the timetable/ class changes for now. It always takes a couple of weeks for this to settle.