When I started planning for our study into Fibonacci, I really struggled. Not with the maths of his number sequence, but with the why's of teaching them. The whole rabbit problem seemed convoluted fantasy, based on assumptions. Maths, in the main, isn't based on assumptions but fact. I read our selection of books before…
Category: Unmuddling Maths
Investigating Quadrilaterals: Angles and Tessellations
The first thing I wanted to do was have a look at angles. Although T11 has done lots of work with them, the girls have not. I showed them how to measure angles using a protractor. They practiced measuring the angles in different shapes. Once they were really comfortable with the basics, I asked them how they might go…
Helping a Struggling Maths Student: Quadrilaterals – Part Two
Discovery goals this week: Revise the quadrilaterals of last week Go over the nets of a cube ensuring each of the 11 nets are found Discover the formulae for the perimeter of all the quadrilaterals which are parallelograms and be able to explain why the formulae work Discover the formulae for the area of the quadrilaterals…
Helping a Struggling Maths Student: Investigating Quadrilaterals
Goals of this week's maths fun: To discover the shapes and names of all the quadrilaterals To be able to recognise each of them as plain mathematical shapes and as shapes in everyday life. To sort, classify and display their findings relating to a bag of quadrilaterals To discover and fully understand the terms 2D and 3D…
Helping a Struggling Maths Student: Learning Without a Curriculum and Using a Maths Informationary
I'm not entirely sure I have what it takes to do this. This being teaching Maths without a curriculum. It seems a bit daunting. Bearing that in mind, it was important for me to be working within a frame work of sorts (the national curriculum). I'll not be teaching from it, but will use it…
Helping a Struggling Math Student: Utilising a foreign number system with a base 4
Please excuse the terrible photos. The children are rehearsing a play they have written and are intending to act out for my birthday. The living room has been turned into a theatre complete with scenery, stage and moveable curtains! It was therefore very dark when I took the photos!! The children discussed first what base…
Helping a Struggling Math Student: Creating their own Number and Place Value Systems
What better way could the children investigate 'what numbers are' than by designing their own number system, followed by a number board which illustrated their own place value system? It was, as ever, very interesting to see how each of my children's minds work at understanding something. T11 understood and seemed to put together a logical yet fairly…
Helping a Struggling Math Student: Introducing Place Value
I have used two books to go over the concept of place value. The girls are certain that they do understand. I am not so sure. Whilst they do usually get long addition, subtraction and multiplication correct, there are occasions where it seems they have forgotten everything they have been taught. This tells me they may…
Helping a Struggling Maths Student: What’s the point?
If you have been reading my blog for very long you will know I have one strong maths student, one average and one weak. I stopped using all curriculum with the twins to attempt to rectify this. I can now with a certain amount of confidence say that I have three potentially strong maths students. …
Helping a Struggling Maths Student: Pascal’s Triangle, Magic Triangles & Number Bond Games
Practising Number Bonds using Pascal's Triangle I thought I would have a fun frivolous lesson as both L10 and C10 seem to be handling any number bond related question I threw their way. Pascal's triangle is a triangle of numbers made up of lots of number bonds: The whole triangle fascinates me and I knew it would feature heavily…
Helping a Struggling Maths Student: Number Bonds
This is my second post of our curriculum free maths journey. For the first post see here. My goal in teaching this wasn't the recitation of number bonds (they could do that already), it was to ensure the girls understood them and were able to apply their understanding to word problems. It was also to…
Unmuddling Maths – Viking Rune Stones and Probability Part Two
The next day I gave them a bag of runes and asked them to follow the instructions I had typed out on the sheet (click on picture below to enlarge it). This lesson was about applying everything from the day before and making some predictions based on this knowledge. They were required to test their predictions and finally…
Unmuddling Maths – Viking Rune Stones and Probability Part One
On our family holiday this year, the children came face to face with amusement arcades. Never having seen anything like it before, they were enamoured and very enthusiastic to spend our money in order to win more back. Needless to say we did not allow them. Until, that is, the last day. It was pouring with…
Exploring Angles and Triangles Viking Style!
Last week we learnt about the Viking alphabet, Runes. We made a stave and found that every letter of the viking alphabet could be made using one of these as a guide. The straight lines, angles and triangles made me think that there could be a maths lesson in there somewhere. I had just ordered…
Unmuddling Maths: Co-ordinate Graphs
This book is a clever little book, explaining the x,y co-ordinates in a way that the children can't fail to remember. This week our hands on maths was all based around this book. The concepts I wanted to teach and/or revise were: Horizontal and vertical Decimals Working with dates and time passing Map keys Working…