Secondary Summer Term Planning & Problems of the Week
The HIAS maths team have put together an overview of maths units for the summer term that support students to engage in some mathematical thinking across all the domains in the mathematics curriculum. Each unit has some of the national curriculum statements for that domain but does not include all the statements. The overview and the linked documents are intended to support teacher’s in their choices of tasks for their students over the coming weeks.
For each unit of work a 'problem of the week' will be provided along with worked solutions. We have pitched the tasks so that the majority of students in that year group would be able to access the task with minimal adult support. It will be important for teachers to adapt tasks for the range of learners they are supporting. The tasks chosen are aimed at revisiting prior learning rather than attempting to support new learning.
Further tips
- Encourage pupils to work on a mathematics activity/ reasoning across the week with their usual timetabled allocation in mind.
- Keep number fluency as a regular activity eg tables facts, key facts about measurement (metric conversions etc), informal methods of calculating and estimating
- Encourage the use of resources found around the house to support an understanding of applications of maths in the real world eg conversion between units in the kitchen store cupboard, applying formulae to change temperature between centigrade and Fahrenheit, looking at appropriate online data and establishing how accurate it is and what the margin of error could be, with reasons.
- Support students problem solving at home with model solutions that include diagrammatic representations, informal jottings and estimation.
- Encourage students to talk through their solutions with parents and older siblings
- Where appropriate, use a web link reference as support for a task
- Make use of the opportunities for thinking mathematically in everyday activities with the whole, family eg baking and making family meals, playing board games, the outside space, constructions with paper and card, working on puzzles such as magic squares and sudoku, etc.
- Avoid worksheet overload where possible