connect with us
  • Home
  • Foundation Phase
    • Literacy >
      • Listening and Speaking >
        • Great Lesson Ideas
        • Lesson Starters
        • Mentorship
      • Reading and Phonics >
        • Lesson Starters
        • Great Lesson Ideas
        • Mentorship
      • Writing and Presenting
    • Mathematics
  • Intermediate Phase
    • Literacy >
      • Listening and Speaking
      • Reading, Viewing
      • Writing and Presenting
      • Language Structures and Conventions
  • Management
  • Webinars
    • Teaching Mathematics Blog
    • Teaching Physical Sciences Blog
    • Make Your School a Digital Rockstar Blog
    • Conversations with Vodacom Discover Graduates
  • Contact Us

Teaching Grade 10 and 11: Ideas for Revision

10/28/2014

0 Comments

 
"Maths is like ice cream, with more flavours than you can imagine - and if all your children ever do is textbook maths, that's like feeding them broccoli- flavoured ice cream." - Denise Gaskins  

It's difficult to complete everything in the year and then still make time for productive revision. Sigh. That sounds like more work.
With roughly 2 weeks to exams, how do we use this time productively? Well, I have a couple ideas.

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 11 Statistics

10/21/2014

0 Comments

 
Grade 11 Statistics builds largely on what was covered in Grade 10. This makes it so important to make sure the learners have a solid understanding of what they've done before. 

Tamlyn spoke about using tables to teach standard deviation, before teaching how to do it on a calculator. To be honest, I thought this was the normal way to teach it.
Box-and-Whisker-Plots are easy to teach to draw, but they can be difficult to draw conclusions from. It's important to do lots of practice in class, especially when talking about how the data is skewed.

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 10 Probability

10/14/2014

0 Comments

 
It's been a long year and it's quickly approaching the end. This is the last section to teach to the Grade 10s before going into revision.

Why do we avoid teaching this section? And when we teach it, why do we teach it like everything else? This section could be interesting, if we think out of out of the box.
That being said, Robyn and I did not talk about anything ground breaking. We spoke about how to teach the different sections and suggested tools and explanations to use. 

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 12 Prelim Review

9/23/2014

0 Comments

 
It's coming to the end. It's almost school holidays and the Matrics are finishing off their prelims. We're tired and they're tried. But we can't lose stream now. 

We should have finished all teaching by now and be doing revision. This webinar focused on how to direct the revision to areas that needed it by doing an analysis of the prelim results.
This kind of analysis can be done on every exam. Leigh showed us how she wrote comments on the exam paper and collected the learners individual results for each question. This allows her to do directed feedback and remediation.

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 11 Finance, Growth and Decay

9/16/2014

0 Comments

 
We often get so lost in the teenage world we teach in that we lose sight of the professional nature of our career.

Some of us study further, but most of us rely on 'on the job' experience for professional development. Honestly, I think the last time I read any academic article/research paper was when I did my degree. But Craig appeals to the professional in each of us. 
He arrived with a list of articles and a lot of interesting slides. I was a little worried that we wouldn't get through it all, but we did!

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 10 Euclidean Geometry

9/9/2014

0 Comments

 
This is now the fourth webinar we've done on Euclidean Geometry and with every person, I see a little more of how fun and interesting the section can be.


Dylan came out from behind the buttons to tell us about one of his favourite sections, Euclidean Geometry. It was quite obvious to see his passion.
In the preparation conversations, Dylan kept emphasizing the importance of developing key skills. These are reason, generalise, conjecture, investigate, justify, prove and explain. All of these skills help with developing sound arguments, whether in Maths or other subjects, or even in future life.

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 12 Revision

9/2/2014

0 Comments

 
I have struggled with this title a lot. How can you teach revision? Yes, you can teach topics, but in my mind, revision is a different process. And with the amount of work we need to cover in the Grade 12 year, it is surprising if we get more than 2 weeks to revise before the exams begin.

I was shocked to hear that Twanette has 4 weeks of revision planned with her class.
How did she manage that? Well, the Maths department at her school chose to teach every Friday afternoon and covered the smaller sections in those afternoons. As a result, they still taught each section in the recommended number of hours, but they created more teaching time for themselves. I didn't think to ask if she got paid extra to do this. It is a fantastic idea.

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 11 Probability

8/26/2014

0 Comments

 
It's coming to the end of year madness. Matrics are almost finished and it feels like everyone else in the school wants to join in their silliness. We're tired, the learners are tired, and now we must teach an imaginative piece of content with excitement? 

If only it were easy. If only someone else could give us ideas...
Robyn gave us unusual examples to use in class. Most of them did not make use of cards, dice or coins. (I can hear your sigh of relief from here!) We're all so bored with those examples. At the end of the day, probability is about far more than gambling. Ask any Maths Lit teacher and they'll tell you about the contexts they use. 

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 10 Statistics

8/19/2014

0 Comments

 
Meaningful - That's the word that kept on coming up today. It is quite easy to teach the skills for this section but it's all pointless without meaningful data to work with.

For years we've recycled the same examples - favourite food at the tuckshop, methods of transport to school, etc, etc. The challenge is to do something different, something beyond the textbook.
Tamlyn did a great example which compared the three nations who competed in the Super 15. The teams total point were added and three box-and-whisker plots were drawn. It was really interesting to see what conclusions we could draw from the diagram.

Read More
0 Comments

Teaching Grade 12 Statistics and Probability

8/12/2014

0 Comments

 
Before I begin with the usual blog post, we need to apologise for the first 3,5 minutes of this recording. We had no sound until half way through our discussion about step 14 in Teach like a Champion. We have put in subtitles until the sound kicks in.
We were a little crazy, thinking we could talk about two sections in one hour. That's four weeks of work. Robyn and I covered a lot of ground, but I've also include links to other websites that could inspire you.
We started by pointing out that both statistics and probability have two weeks allocated to them, which is the same length of time dedicated to Euclidean Geometry. It blows my mind that Euclidean Geometry is worth up to 53 marks, and statistics and probability are worth a combined total of up to 41 marks. The ratio of time versus marks just makes no sense.

Read More
0 Comments
<<Previous

    About Helen

    Helen says she has the best job in the world. Each week she gets to talk about teaching strategy with exciting guests and then she gets to write about the shows in this blog. #HappyMindsetter

    #MEMaths Tweets

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.