...With jam in! Badumdum-tshh...

Not sure if that really works, but I enjoyed my first Maths Jam so much last night that I thought it would make a great topic for my SBPC post today.

If you don't know about Maths Jam (I didn't until Beth (@MissBLilley) invited me along at the last maths conference), it's a monthly get-together for "maths enthusiasts" in your local area, which understandably attracts a lot of maths teachers. It's also something I wish I'd found out about a lot sooner, as I've been back in Leeds for over four years now, and would have really enjoyed going along to these as I was settling back in and making new friends.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for a couple of problems from Solve my Maths.

I've been using bar modelling quite extensively in my teaching since being involved with the NCETM's multiplicative reasoning project last year. Part of the project was to emphasise the importance of diagrammatic representations of problems in teaching maths for understanding; we were given materials to deliver to Key Stage 3 classes, some of which included use of Singapore bar modelling for topics such as fractions, percentages and ratio. I found the work we did really altered my teaching; I think that I managed to teach addition of fractions successfully for the first time since I started teaching, and I was amazed at just how well my students retained efficiency and accuracy with "traditional" written methods.

It seemed like a bit of a no-brainer to pick the bar modelling workshop at the Celebration of Maths, so I and my colleagues trotted along to the session, sat down with our mini-whiteboards and got ready to draw some bars. One thing I was really keen to get out of this session was to iron out some issues I still had with using the bar to solve problems with negative amounts, and I was still struggling to see how to apply bar modelling to exam technique (see my attempt with the Edexcel SAMs here).

First of all we looked at some simple problems, like fractions of amounts. I'm already pretty happy with this - there are plenty of examples of stuff like this in my Year 7's books at the moment. I was so proud of myself that I thought I'd add a really constructive "what went well" to my work too.