The first term of the new academic year has been extremely exciting for students in their maths classes. As well as learning more about coordinates and numbers, the Year 7s worked in small groups and completed one of the Bowlands Activities. These mathematical investigations have been specifically designed to be cross curricular and to engage the students in a number of ways. As the Year 8s did last year, the Year 7s examined a fictitious town where road accidents have been occurring in great numbers. Students were provided with a map of the town and locations of the accidents. They were then expected to use many different skills to identify which accidents were occurring most frequently and, more importantly, how these accidents could be avoided in the future. Groups were allocated a budget that was insufficient to solve all of the issues faced by the town, and had to allocate the resources in the most efficient way they could. They followed this with a presentation to a "town council" and had to justify why their ideas were the most effective way to maximise the amount of lives saved.
Several Year 8 classes were given the opportunity to create three dimensional objects. Students were stretched beyond the construction of simple prisms and pyramids, and were expected to research and construct octahedrons (objects with eight faces), dodecahedrons (twelve-faces) and icosohedrons (twenty faces)!
Students were given access to computers and had to research what the objects were, before being able to construct them. The number of ways students went about this was truly inspiring; some creating nets first and others building them out of straws! Having been a mathematics teacher for quite a few years now I can safely say that the students’ thinking skills showed innovation, and are a testament to the Academy’s design and built environment specialism.
We look forward to another successful term in which many of the Year 7s will be encountering Algebra for the first time and the Year 8s will be calculating areas, perimeters and volumes of a variety of shapes and objects. |
