Sunday 22 February 2009

Year 7 unit plans with Rich Tasks

I have recently worked with some North Wiltshire schools on trying to find "rich tasks" to link to current year 7 units to address some of the aims of the new curriculum. I am currently struggling to find the best way to make these available but there is a link here to the summary page I have made showing what is available http://www.wiltshire-ast.co.uk/media/maths-documents/index.php and a link here gives a blank unit plan: http://www.wiltshire-ast.co.uk/media/maths-media/index.php Note that hyperlinks to external sites should be ok but those to other files I made will not work yet. I have spoken to the people at County Hall who support web development and after April 1st I hope to be able to submit folder to them to upload so that people can access a folder for each unit worked on that will contain an overview of the lessons and active hyperlinks to the resources needed and to any externally referenced websites.

APP in mathematics

The Subject Leaders' training day on Feb 25th 2009 at Urchfont covered the new guidance for mathematics APP. The general message was to try to use some of the new APP guideline documents for a small sample of one of your classes. The intention is that by using this assessment for say 4 or 5 key students in one class (differing abilities, attitudes etc) you can then use these as benchmark assessments for the other students in your class. Doing it in detail for 4 or 5 means you do not need to do the detail for the others. There is no requirement to maintain a portfolio of evidence for any student. The document showing level descriptions for two levels per page is found at http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/150769 It gives a two page spread for each pair of levels (e.g. levels 2 and 3, then 3 and 4 etc) with a column for each AT at and a list of the skills within each for teachers to use as a checklist for assessing a student's ability. This was published in 2008.
This link takes you to the page containing all the training materials from the Urchfont day http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/132204?uc=force_uj
The standard 2 page grid listing all key objectives by attainment target and level can be found here: http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/150773
The following link takes you to a general download and information page where you may find examples and publications which are helpful: http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/search/results/nav%3A46224+facets%3A24341

Friday 6 February 2009

Editing the MPA map

You may want to adapt the MPA map so that it shows which areas of it are being addressed in a unit plan. I have used the map at the start of each new unit I have planned so that teachers using it are aware of the skills that they are delivering and can start to mention these to students. You will need to download the adaptable template from the right hand side of the page on this link http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/16015?uc=force_uj and then you will need to download a piece of software called FreeMind from the link on the same page (or here http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.) When you have downloaded FreeMind, right click on the adaptable template icon and then "Open with" and choose FreeMind from the list.
I managed to start using FreeMind fairly easily. Double click on a bubble to edit it. If it then looks too long when you have finished, right click on it and choose "Edit long node" and then put some return characters in to make it look better.

New Framework objectives

This link takes you to the new Framework objectives - select by year and topics within each AT and you will see the explanation of the objective and a link to the supplement of examples for each objective. The APP link at the bottom of the page shows you the level of the work.
http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/secondary/framework/maths/fwsm/mlo

MPA terms explained a little bit

The phrases used on the MPA map always cause me some confusion. Although I don't think it really matters which phrase a "rich task" should be linked to, I wanted to try to understand what was meant by each of the terms. I have collected together some descriptions of the phrases on the MPA map for each of Number, Algebra, Geometry, Statistics and ICT in Maths. These all came from various bits of the Standards Site I think. Follow the maths path on the following link
http://www.wiltshire-ast.co.uk/