Hi all

Hope your first week back has gone well!

Year 10 Lessons – Trigonometry

I hope you are finding these lessons easy to follow and effective at securing your pupils’ understanding of the Sine Ratio. These lessons introduce trigonometry much slower than perhaps you have introduced trigonometry before. This is intentional with the aim being to support a deep understanding of Trigonometry instead of focusing in on the SOHCAH TOA formulae. There is an interesting article in the NCETM about this here:

NCTEM Article about T&L of Trig

Having observed a few of us teaching these lessons I have noticed that some staff preferring to teach students how to label a right angled-triangle first. This isn’t necessary; to access the Sine ratio students only need to be introduced to the opposite side as they will hopefully be able to identify the hypotenuse already from their knowledge of Pythagoras Theorem in Year 9. The adjacent side is introduced in Lesson 5 – Understanding Cosine. I am busy uploading more of these lessons this week, if you have any amazing resources that you think would make a good addition to our Year 10 lessons please do share them with me.

e-AQA

AQA provide a free enhanced results analysis for all teachers. The information you can get from this service is really valuable and interesting. For example, at BAA last year’s Y11 higher tier cohort significantly under performed with the ratio questions in comparison to other similar centres despite ratio and proportion being a focus in the spring term.

The Year 10 mock also flagged up this as an area of comparable weakness so clearly we need to focus more on this area with our current Year 11 at BAA. The medium term plans have already been altered to ensure this happens.

E-AQA allows us to look at individual questions too. This question from the Foundation tier tripped up a larger proportion of students at BAA compared to all students nationally: (24% of BAA students got it correct compared to 44% nationally)

Whereas BAA students did better on average with this question from Paper 2 on the Higher tier:

 

Interesting stuff that can perhaps highlight areas of strengths and weakness within our own teaching so if you haven’t signed up and had a look yet please do! To gain access you need to know your schools centre number and your exams officer to authorize you.

BWA Mathleates Marathon in a Month challenge

Adam, Michelle and I have half completed our challenge after running the Great North Run yesterday. It was a fantastic day and we are already planning for next year, I think we are going to run it dressed up as Maths equipment. Pairs of compasses maybe? We are already 76% into our target of raising £500 for the MS Society. If you would like to donate here is the link:

JustGiving Marathon in a Month Page

Louise