Hi all

Happy Sunday… Friday was manic this week!

Spaced Retrieval 

This last week I have observed a number of KS4/KS5 lessons at BBA, BWA, BAA & NES and saw lots of spaced retrieval opportunities which was great. As we know spaced retrieval is incredibly important. Hermann Ebbinghaus’ theory of the “forgetting curve” is the hypothesis that if we do not revisit learned information, then, over time, the likelihood of us remembering that information will be drastically reduced; which practically we all regularly appreciate!

Whilst we interleave prior knowledge into our curriculum, it doesn’t always make sense with all concepts (obviously!). The most effective spaced retrieval observed was bespoke to the class from different types of formative assessment (HW / low stakes quizzes / End of Year QLA); didn’t take more than 5/10 minutes and included an open ended question that enabled “quicker” students the opportunity to think more deeply about a particular concept. 

Please remember the MathsBot retrieval generator: MathsBot

Year 8 Common Assessment 

The two assessments are now uploaded here: Autumn 1 Assessment. It is important that all students sit the common assessment so that we can identify which students are in need of additional support. Thank you for all your hard work in advance meeting the data deadline of Friday, 15th November.

Another Maths Website! 

This week I have been looking through a site called Mathigon. The “PolyPad” section contains a selection of virtual manipulatives which are lovely; the fraction bars in particular may be of use to us as we finish the fractions work with Year 7.

Year 11 Teaching Resources

This week with my Year 11 class we have been revising angles and polygons as it was a clear weakness for their End of Year 10 assessment. I have uploaded the lessons I developed for this here: Angles

Hope you all have a great last week of Autumn 1

Louise

Hi all

Happy Friday!

Year 8 Common Assessment

The feedback from last years common assessment consistently included the need for a more accessible version for a small selection of our SEN cohort so we are going to trial a tiered common assessment for this assessment window. I will be preparing a very accessible version of the Year 8 Autumn 1 Common Assessment over the next week so please don’t print out the Y8 common assessment yet. A number of students scored less than 5 marks on last years common assessment which will have been very demoralising. Heads of Maths will help identify students that may benefit from the more accessible common assessment.

NEW Further Maths GCSE (8365)

At our subject leaders meeting on Wednesday afternoon we had a quick look at the specimen papers from AQA.

They can be found here: Further Maths Spec Papers

At first glance they don’t look particularly any more challenging which I am a bit disappointed by but we will have to see. I have emailed AQA to ask if they have plans to release any more assessment materials so will let you know when I hear back.

MathsHub CPL

If you are interested in embedding technology in Level 3 Mathematics this year take a look at this collaborative project with East Midlands West MathsHub (George Spencer).

Embedding Tech in Level 3 Maths

Year 11 Revision Resources

This week I have been teaching my Y11 Higher/Foundation class about calculating an original cost after a percentage change. These lessons can be found here:  Percentages

Hope you all have a restful weekend

Louise

Happy Friday all – hope everyone has had a good week!

Beautiful Books 

Now we are 4 weeks into the new year, how are our books looking? I spent the day at BWA on Tuesday and noticed stars on the front of students books.

The BWA Maths team are using stars on the front of students books to praise students for when their book work meets/exceeds expectations, like so:

Additionally, the front of students books are being marked with a dot to let students know that their book work is not up to scratch and needs improving. After three dots students are given a negative point and detention. Was great to see such a simple and effective way of promoting presentation.

More Maths Websites

This week at the MathsHub Subject Leaders meeting on Wednesday a few more useful websites were shared.

GiftedBA – some fantastic resources on here created by a lead teacher from Barking Abbey School.

BossMaths – Basic PPT lessons on everything! For free!

MathsBot – I know many of us use this site a lot already but I hadn’t seen the spaced retrieval starter generator before! So easy to use, with answers too. I know a lot of us are creating bespoke spaced retrieval activities for our classes, which is often very effective – but this tool can save us lots of time! Retrieval Starter

Again, if you find any useful Maths websites please share 🙂

Year 11 Resources 

I have just uploaded some Pythagoras revision lessons here: Trigonometry & Pythagoras Revision. I tried these with my Higher/Foundation Year 11 class at BBA this week and they worked well – getting students to recall basic area formula whilst applying Pythagoras’ Theorem.

Hope you all have a great weekend

Louise

Hi all

And hello and welcome to our new PGCE students! This year we are hosting six PGCE students for their first placement from both UoN and NTU: 2 @ BAA, 2 @ BBA, 1 @ NES and 1 @ BWA. Big thank you to all those involved in supporting them.

Year 10 Summer 2

I know many of us didn’t get time to finish off this unit of learning at the end of last academic year. Lessons are now up – please ensure you add them to your Year 11 medium term plans.

Maths Websites 

Adam regularly shares this list of websites with the Maths team at BWA. There are so many incredible Maths websites it is hard to keep track so here is a list from Adam to remind you of some! If anyone has anymore please let me know and I will share them on here.

MathsBot

So many resources! Great for exam-style questions, revision grids, customisable practice paper generator, manipulatives, puzzles, differentiated question generator etc. Just check it out!

Corbett Maths

A huge selection of videos and worksheets on every topic you can imagine. This also includes exam-style booklets, as well as practice exam papers.

SSDD Problems

Same Surface, Different Deep Structure maths problems from Craig Barton – discussed and contributed to last year – fantastic revision!

Variation Theory

Intelligent, varied maths practice from Craig Barton – as discussed during a recent faculty meeting. A cornerstone of the mastery approach, and enabling students to notice the connections within a topic.

Open Middle

Challenging Maths problems designed to stretch students – excellent for use as an extension task that can deepen rather than broaden.

What it is not!

The use of non-examples can encourage students to deepen their understanding of a particular concept. This new website, created by Jonathan Hall (author of MathsBot) is creating and sharing them.

Increasingly Difficult Questions

Another useful resource, increasing the difficulty of questions at an increased rate as students work through exercises.

Functional Maths

Plenty of resources to help both parents and teachers get the best out of their children. These include video tutorials, differentiated worksheets and exam booklets for topics.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Louise

Hello all

Year 11 Lessons

Please notice that the Similar Shapes lessons in the Year 11 Higher section of the website have been uploaded (again big thank you BWA Maths!) and I have uploaded a set of solving Simultaneous Equation revision lessons in the Year 11 Foundation section (although suitable for Higher revision too!).

I have been looking through results and trends from the last two years across our schools and have noticed that there appears to be a fairly consistent trend in achievement from End of Year 10 to Mock 1 for us all.

Here the orange line represents a progress trend from 2018 and the blue line represents a progress trend from last academic year. Essentially Mock 1 performance doesn’t appear to be as strong as the End of Year 10 Mock performance. Some of this dip in performance may, in part, be explained by tier decisions; some students may have done well on the Foundation tier so consequently entered for Higher tier for Mock 1 (and not done as well!). Perhaps this dip is also caused by the summer holiday and lack of retrieval over the summer holiday. Either way I’d be interested to hear your thoughts – what do you think causes this? What can we do to overcome it?

Year 7 Transition 

This week I have been looking through the Question Level Analysis for the current Year 7 cohort at BBA and found that approximately 50% of BBA students got this Paper 1 question wrong back in early May.

A criticism of our scheme of learning that I occasionally hear from colleagues, students and/or parents is that students have “done this before” or that “it is too easy”. Whilst it is true that our Year 7 curriculum does overlap with Year 6, it is important for us all to remember that although students will have been taught how to add fractions with different denominators in Primary this does mean that a) they can do it fluently, b) they understand the mathematics behind it and c) they can apply this knowledge and understanding to unfamiliar contexts.

I have created three Year 7 Addition & Subtraction Quizzes from recent KS2 Arithmetic Papers. Please either set these as homework or use them as your weekly quiz over the rest of the half term. My hope is that these will provide you with some insight into what your Year 7 students can accurately calculate from KS2.

Hope you all have a great week

Louise

Hi all

Hope you are all over the shock of being back/having to wake up very early!

Synoptic Questions

Thank you for your hard work creating a selection of these. I am busy converting them to PowerPoint and integrating them into our lessons at the moment. I think these questions are best introduced to students initially as goal-free problems to help students understand how these style of questions are often more accessible than they appear to be. I am creating a bank of goal free/synoptic questions for each half term for all year groups. See Year 10 Autumn 1 Lesson 22 and let me know what you think!

GCSE Results 2019

There were some exceptional results from across the trust this summer. For example the proportion of grade 9’s in Mathematics awarded across the trust was 3.5% which is above the county average of 3.2%. If you haven’t seen the map of GCSE grades by county it is here: Map of outcomes. This map doesn’t take into what the outcomes should be given KS2 performance but it is still interesting. I would like to investigate what is happening in Buckinghamshire where nearly 10% of 16 years old were awarded a grade 9 in Maths.

Year 11 Lessons 

Thank you to Alex from BAA and the BWA Maths team for collaboratively planning some lessons about vectors and similarity. These are continuing to be uploaded this week 🙂

Hope you all have a great week

Louise

Welcome back everyone, I hope you have all had an amazing summer break!

As the new year starts I enjoy the challenge of establishing high expectations and new routines with my brand new classes. I read an article recently that quoted “You establish, what you establish” which resonated with me. Having high expectations and ensuring we consistently reinforce them is such an important feature of brilliant teaching. When we make a big fuss about the small things like uniform, presentation, having a calculator… the message we are sending to our students is that we care, believe in our students and know that they can achieve great things if they work hard. To help outline your expectations I have updated the welcome lesson from last year. Please feel free to edit and use.

Welcome Lesson 2019 PPT

As you will see this presentation references a student questionnaire. Last year I was inspired by Laura at NES as she gave her new Y11 classes a student questionnaire to complete during their first lesson. Often I use students questionnaires to help evaluate my own teaching practice at the end of a year/key stage however this year I intend to use them at the start. I think this could help us get to know our students more quickly and start the process of building positive working relationships with them by making them feel heard. Please feel free to use/edit this too!

GCSE Student Questionnaire

That is all for now – I know how much information there is at the start of every new academic year! More to follow from me about the use of synoptic questions, low stakes testing and summer examination results later in the week.

If you need anything please do get in touch

Louise

Hi all

Happy National Numeracy Day!

If you haven’t seen this website raising the profile of numeracy across the country it is well worth a look.

What’s the issue?

It shares some worrying statistics such as “half of the population have the numeracy skills of a Primary school child”. There is also a numeracy quiz to take which is actually more challenging that I assumed it would be but also fairly lengthy!

Maths Websites

There are so many amazing Maths websites out there it can sometimes be a challenge not to forget one. This web page has links to lots of them (excluding BluecoatMaths though unfortunately..) – it is well worth bookmarking.

Lots of Maths Websites Page!

More Revision Resources

Thank you Alex for creating these Paper 1 warm up questions (with solutions) for both tiers of entry.

Paper 1 2019 Warm Up

My Year 11 class at NES were fantastic working with Circle Theorems last week but needed lots of support with the basic angle facts so I created this with a set of angle chase puzzles I found.

AngleChaseRevisionPPT

I printed out the appropriate slides nice and big and they worked in pairs working out as many angles as the could – essentially goal free angle problems to encourage students to not just focus on getting the answer but working out anything that they can. It worked really well, feel free to use.

Hope all the Y11/12/13 revision is going well!

Louise

Hi all

Year 7 CAF 

This is ready to print and uploaded. The deadline for data entry is the 3rd June.

Thank you in advance for all your hard work ensuring that all students sit this assessment and that the data deadline is met.

Year 11 Paper 1

Have been thinking about the skills and knowledge that can only really be assessed without a calculator and have come up with following list:

• Arithmetic with Fractions
• Multiplication and Division with Decimals
• Calculating with roots and with integer and fractional/negative indices
• Simplifying and Rationalising Surds
• Calculating with Standard Form
• Calculating with Percentages
• Knowing and working exact trig values (Foundation too!) (Year 10 Aut 1 Lesson 11)

Can you think of anything else? Let me know!

Thanks to Ruth at NES who recently showed me a different pattern for students to learn to help them remember the exact values for tan… of course!

This still requires students to be able to rationalise tan 30; if the question was to circle the value of tan 30 I imagine only the rationale form being available as a choice. Using special triangles also requires students to be able to rationalise though. Interestingly rationalising surds  is a Higher only concept so I am curious how Foundation students are expected to understand why the value of sin 30 is root 2 over 2 if they are only taught the specification. So far this topic has only come up twice on the Foundation tier, June 17 Paper 1 and Nov 18 Paper 1 as below:

No need to rationalise to get these right…

OnMaths.com have predicted a AQA Paper 1 by looking at previous series and seeing what has yet to be assessed. Students complete the predicted paper online and there is also a walk-through YouTube video that accompanies it.

Hope everyone is enjoying the 4 day week!

Louise

Happy Pi Day!

Year 8 Common Assessment

Thank you to all of you involved with the checking of this assessment, it is now ready and in the assessment area ready for printing. The deadline for data entry is 3rd April.

Year 11 Mock 2 Grade Boundaries 

Following advise from AQA we will be using (slightly inflated) November 2018 grade boundaries with Mock 2. These should have been updated on G4S but if you spot any issues please let your Head of Maths know.