Tuesday 8 November 2016

Increasingly Difficult Questions/Exercises

This is something I'm really proud of, and something I'm really happy with and enjoying with my classes - and they really like it too.

I've created a web site at http://taylorda01.weebly.com and have started to upload a number of resources that I've referred to as 'Increasingly Difficult Exercises', using increasingly difficult question sets.
The idea came from training from the White Rose Maths Hub in school at the beginning of last year and came to fruition following Maths Conf 7 at the Royal Armouries in Leeds after asking 'Why don't these things exist?' and realising I could do them and make them available.

The intention of this blog is to share how I use the resources in my own classroom.


I've been annoyed over the last few years by students not taking care in their work and their books becoming messy. My colleagues get around this by having students work on whiteboards, but I don't like students not having something to refer to in their books, so I've decided to meet them halfway.



I don't have standard whiteboards in my room. I use plastic wallets with printouts inside, that can be rearranged for different purposes. I was given these ages ago, and I believe that they were called 'Leeds MathsPaks' at one point, but this might not be true. I've created another sheet to put in their packs that looks like this:

The students work through the shorter question sets on their whiteboards in the space on the left, writing down their answers in the space provided on the right and erasing their workings before going for the next question. After 10-15 minutes, I stop them and go through the answers, explaining where students need more explanation as to why this is the answer.