The Storeroom Blog

Photo challenge (4) - It's all Greek to me...

11/8/2015

Today we visited an active volcano near Santorini, which was all very interesting, but had limited opportunities for taking mathematical photos. The best I could find today were some Greek letters on a can of beer and some pretty reflections in the water when we arrived on Mykonos in the evening.

Photo challenge (3) - Set with playing cards

10/8/2015

Monday was a day at sea, with not much to do except lounge around in the sun. We retreated to one of the bars in the afternoon when it got too hot, and decided to attempt to play Set with playing cards.

Photo challenge (2) - Archways

9/8/2015

Walking around Split in Croatia gave me lots of opportunities to spot semi-circular or Roman arches - I may turn these into a couple of short problems for starters. There's a good one on NRich already!

Photo challenge (1) - Infinite mirrors

8/8/2015

As we spent the day driving to Manchester, then flying to Munich and finally on to Venice, then getting a coach to the port, then doing our lifeboat safety drill, I had very little time to spot any maths. However, I decided that the infinite mirrored lifts onboard our boat were definitely mathematical enough to become my first photo in the challenge!

Chinese School and the photo challenge

7/8/2015

In case you've missed the hashtag #chineseschool on Twitter and the blogs popping up everywhere at the moment, the BBC aired the first programme in a new three-part series on Wednesday night. Titled "Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School", the programme follows five Chinese teachers as they attempt to teach a group of British pupils using Chinese methodology.

Top 5 for starters

7/8/2015

I wrote a post a while back about my philosophy on starters, so thought I'd supplement it with a post about great websites for no-fuss five-minute activities. Most of the starters on these sites require very little or no preparation, so can be used off the cuff. So, in no particular order, here are my top sites for starters:

It's a marathon, not a sprint

5/8/2015

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the importance of trust, so I thought I'd follow that up today with another tip for NQTs. It's something I need to keep working on myself, although I am getting better - last academic year, I hit the Autumn term exhaustion wall about three weeks before Christmas, as opposed to a week after October half term.

Set sensible routines and practices for things like marking and lesson planning

My Twitter history

4/8/2015

I spent a bit of time playing catch-up with all the #summerblogchallenge posts I'd missed from everyone else today and spotted @DrBennison's Twitter History post. I've seen a couple more Twitter Wordles recently, and quite liked this idea, so thought I'd have a play in today's post.

Here's my Twitter Wordle:

I love how big both #mathschat and #mathsTLP appear; I'm obviously using those a lot, which probably also explains why both @mathsjem and @solvemymaths feature so highly!

I'm also quite enjoying the fact that there are so many positive words on there - I may use this to motivate myself in September when I'm getting the post-holiday blues.

My #summer10

3/8/2015

I mentioned a while ago that I was going to do a #summer10 post at some point; despite the fact that I'm two weeks into my holiday, I've pretty much been living and breathing wedding plans and celebrations for most of those, and I realised this morning that I still have nearly five weeks of holiday left, which is incredibly exciting. So here's my #summer10, the ten things I'd like to achieve in the holiday I have left...

It's only a model - Part 2

2/8/2015

Another quick one today to follow on from yesterday's post about the best maths in action I've ever seen, with the promise that more relevant blogging will resume from tomorrow!

Here are a couple of pics of the "scale model" in action...

It's only a model...

1/8/2015

Another cheaty pre-written post today - as you're reading this, I'll be nowhere near a computer and celebrating my wedding in my in-laws back garden.

This is a really personal post, and possibly completely irrelevant to anyone but me and about three other people, but I thought I'd share a few images of where I'm spending my day (no, it's not at Camelot).

When we came up with the idea of introducing a slight festival theme to our wedding celebrations, my dad-in-law suggested building a festival tent in their back garden for the after-party. I envisaged a gazebo-type construction with a bit of bunting; however, somewhere around February this year, my fiance and I were proudly shown this:

It's a scale plan of their garden with the planned construction. The big bit of wood in the middle is a tree, and the whole structure is designed properly with stresses and strains in the right places so it won't all fall over - it's been up for two months now in real life and it does work.

After I'd got over the "aarrgh it's amazing" bit, the mathematician in me took over - I think this is one of the best bits of "real-life maths" I've ever seen. I'm going to adapt this for use in my classroom next year somehow, as there's scale drawing, accurate measurement and lots of shapes to spot in the roof construction.

My favourite bit had to be this little wooden person to give a bit of relative sizing, although he's actually a little too tall.

I'll tweet some pictures later on today of what it actually looks like - I've seen it as a shell but I'm preparing to be overwhelmed at the transformation later on today!

Forward>>