Creative Maths Activities for Able Students

Ideas for Working with Children Aged 11 to 14

Anne Price

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412920445, 9781412920438
• eBook ISBN: 9781446241998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Mathematics

?All the ideas look easy to use and quick to prepare... This is a very interesting and thought provoking book - it manages to ask questions about how we teach able children but also provides some ideas and some materials to help? - The Association of Teachers of Mathematics

Finding stimulating and challenging maths activities for able pupils in a mainstream classroom can be demanding for the busy teacher, especially if maths is not your specialism.

Based on her experience as an Advanced Skills Teacher and LEA Consultant, Anne Price explains the issues and theories surrounding the education of able pupils and links these to practical, creative examples to be used in the classroom.

Useful resources include:

- Photocopiable materials,

- Advice on different teaching styles,

- Activities and tasks for individuals, groups or the whole class

GATCOs, Numeracy Consultants, Learning Support Teachers and Student and class teachers looking for new and creative ways of teaching maths activities to able students will find this book invaluable.

Part B

This is the section of the book that provides activities which you may photocopy and use with students. Teaching notes provide guidance on:

• prior knowledge
• lesson objectives
• timing
• equipment
• suggested outcome.

In most cases questions to start the students thinking about the mathematical issues raised are suggested, but this book is unlike a standard mathematical text, so nothing is set in stone. Within each task there is considerable flexibility.

Chapter 4

This chapter has suggestions on the use of a range of teaching strategies you will find useful with all students but are much enjoyed by able mathematicians. These are:

• co-operative group work
• inductive teaching
• Direct Attention Thinking Tools (DATT)
• use of ICT.

The tasks are structured but with the opportunity for the most able to demonstrate creative approaches.

Chapters 5–7

These chapters provide tasks which become increasingly more student led, chapter by chapter. You are advised not to use tasks from Chapter 7 if your students have not had any previous experience of this sort of mathematics, as they may lack the confidence to make the decisions required of them. Examples in Chapter 5 are more structured and so reduce any feelings of uncertainty which may occur at an early stage.

Chapter 8

This has additional suggestions for master-class activities. The difference between these activities and others is more about the time needed to make some inroads into the task than the difficulty.

Chapter 4

Teaching strategies with practical suggestions

This chapter will provide information and practical examples on:

• Co-operative group work
  • Igloo
• Inductive teaching
  • Letters
  • Graphwork
• Direct Attention Thinking Tools (DATT)
  • A Porsche or not
  • The taxman sees all
• Use of ICT
  • Tug of war
  • Spheres
  • Polygons.

Co-operative group work

It would detract significantly from the purpose of developing creativity if you decided to deliver the activities in latter chapters from the front using a highly directed, step-by-step, teaching approach. That is not to say that there may be times when you will need to discuss particular points with everyone involved in order to move the learning on, but too much direction may discourage the more divergent thinker and hinder his/her creative process.

Many of the activities could be undertaken using a co-operative group-work approach to ease the transition from teacher led to student led. When researchers such as Slavin (1995) compared student achievement in small-group settings with traditional whole-class instruction they found that there were significant learning gains in the grouped situation. Thinking back to the affective issues raised in Chapter 2, you may wish to encourage group-working for social-emotional reasons as well as mathematical fulfilment. You may feel that by allocating roles within groups you will be able to cultivate less well developed talents.

Webb (1991) found that achievement was raised through the process of explaining thoughts and ideas to other group members but that receiving no feedback for those ideas had negative impact. Think–pair–share is now regularly used in British classrooms and co-operative group work is essentially an extension of this process. The skills of working as a member of a group have to be learnt, and for some able students the process of sharing ideas may be more challenging than the mathematics itself. Organizational and communication skills are developed alongside mathematical skills providing an important basis to more creative activity.

The construction of the groups needs consideration if all members are to be given equal learning opportunities. Equality of learning opportunity does not necessarily imply that each pupil engages in identical tasks. It may be useful to use differently constructed groups, dependent upon the type of activity/task (these terms are used interchangeably) and the possible learning gains. As you will notice in the example, the Igloo, each group has a roughly equivalent subtask to undertake but this need not be so. It is possible to design activities such that the subtasks can appeal to students with differing talents, each then bringing particular expertise to the main task.

Although the approach might vary, the method encourages the development of both social and mathematical skills. Each group member has individual responsibility and responsibility to the group as a whole. The jigsaw approach which is used in the example, the Igloo, requires that the group ensures that every member has the understanding necessary to work as an expert on one particular aspect, for example finding volume of a sphere.

The diagrams demonstrate how the groupings work in the classroom.

The number of groups and the number of students within eac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART A
• PART B
• Just for teachers
• References
• index