Hello Maths,

December is here, which means it’s the NRich Advent calendar time. I always enjoy using these to start my lessons in December. The problem from the 1st fits in very nicely with the area work from year 7 at the moment.  If you do use any of the problems in class, or if any of your students try the problems at home, please encourage your students to share what they have tried and discovered. At the bottom of each problem page there is a comment box where they can submit their work, or they can email their solutions to NRich.  Their attempts may be featured in their showcase. There is also a Primary Advent calendar here.

If your students (or you!) enjoy the problems, there are many more for them to explore on the Wild Maths website. I clicked on the link How to Solve Equations, which is a talk by Dr Vicky Neale on how mathematicians approach solving equations. The video is quite long, but at 8 minutes, there’s a really interesting bit on how she would find the number of integer solutions to this problem.

If you’ve got a few spare minutes maybe have a go yourself before watching the video.

I know that several of you have said that it’s taking quite a bit of time to work through the year 7 scheme this half term.  If you need to carry over into next half term, then please do so – as long as we have the test done by the 20th Jan please.

There is no year 8 test this half term. Year 9 at Aspley and Wollaton and Year 10 at BBA have a test this coming week. It will be on the site by the end of the weekend.  The Year 10 test for Aspley and Wollaton is due after the first week back in January.

That’s it for today – short and sweet.

See you all next week,

Matilde