I love teaching transformations. It is such a visual topic, and there are loads of excellent resources out there to help teach it. It is also an area where technology can easily be used in the classroom. For a selection of free online Autograph activities on transformations, click here. Having just done a recap with my year 10 on the 4 transformations, I was looking for an activity to get them thinking about what they have to do, and most importantly, make them realise how important it is to fully describe a transformation. So I went searching in my usual places, and found this fantastic resource on TES. There are three documents, one for reflection, one for rotation (shown) and one for enlargement. In each there are 4 or 5 exam style questions, which have been answered by "Stephen". Below each question there is a box where students must choose whether Stephen is correct or not, and give a reason for their answer. In my experience, students love marking work, and it is hugely beneficial to their learning as well. And this resource was definitely that. As the author (the amazing Damian Watson) suggests, I printed them out, and put them all into a single booklet to give to my students. This then looked a little bit like an actual exam paper. As well as deciding on whether he is right for each question, I made my students give a detailed reason why they thought that, and also, if they believed he was incorrect, then they needed to correct his answer. I also asked them to think about why he made the mistake he did (thinking about common misconceptions). Another benefit that came out of doing this activity was how many marks you get for a particular answer. Many of the students ticked that it was wrong, and gave him 0 marks. So in the plenary we discussed how many marks he would actually get for each of his answers, and this highlighted to my students that they could still get some marks if they did something silly. This activity went down even better than I expected, and the whole group picked up on almost all of the mistakes Stephen had made (even little things like forgetting a direction for a rotation).
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Dan Rodriguez-Clark
I am a maths teacher looking to share good ideas for use in the classroom, with a current interest in integrating educational research into my practice. Categories
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August 2021
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