I
am a student at Warwick University studying maths. I did a
module on secondary school teaching, and as a part of this, I
got the chance to do teaching experience in schools. This is
a
log of the work I have done and materials I used.
This is the first bit of teaching I have planned. It is for a
year 7 bottom set, and it is designed to be a 10 minute introduction or
starter to a lesson teaching the relationship between fractions,
decimals and percentages.
I start with a presentation
and find out how much they know. Hopefully this refreshes the
topic in their minds and makes it a bit easier to understand.
Then I get them to work in 2s or 3s with a set of cards, some of which
have pictures
of fractions, some written
fractions and some decimals
for if they get that far. There are two levels of difficulty,
so
they will get 6 different fractions to match up, and the ones that
manage that quickly enough can try 6 slightly harder ones, try to match
up simple decimals with them, and then see if they can recognise
equivalent fractions (2/5 = 4/10, etc). Afterwards I go
through
the last few slides of the presentation to make sure they get the right
answers and help them to see why.
Wednesday 22 March
We will be working with 10 of the brightest students in set 2 of a year
9 group. We're going to go through their exam papers (which
we
had the pleasure of marking for most of the day), and introduce laws of
indices. It's technically a lesson, but no resources as such,
just some notes on which questions to try with them.
Friday 24 March
Our first proper lesson. The objective is to introduce
expanding
brackets. We will use the following method to explain why we
multiply out brackets the way we do:
If we are
extending by 2 one way and 1 the other, we can add these lines on, and
by splitting up the shape we can find the area of each bit.
Then
we just add them up.
I have made a worksheet
of practice questions of increasing complexity to make sure they
understand what they're supposed to do. And here's a version
with
the answers.
Thursday 30 March
We did a joint starter for Janice's year 7 group on increasing and
decreasing numbers by a percentage. We came up with a bunch
of
questions and did a kind of quiz with them. They each had a
little whiteboard and pen, and put their answers on that, so we could
see what everyone in the room had worked out. It went down
well,
and they all got involved, but made them a bit noisy. We went
round helping afterwards to explain how to do some of the harder
questions from the exercises.
I created a Training Entry Profile
which is a log
of my experiences along with the relevant QTS (Qualified Teacher
Status) standards which I have touched on or begun to meet alongside.
Have a look if you want to see a fuller account of what I did
in the three weeks.
