Catriona Agg
@catrionaagg.bsky.social
2.6K followers 470 following 740 posts
Maths teacher. I aim to share lots of snippets of my lessons using #MathsToday and would encourage you to do the same! Also occasional geometry puzzles 🧩
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morrismaths359.bsky.social
#Mathstoday
Love these questions the year 10s did for factorising quadratics. Gave students a lot of the scaffolding they needed allowing them to move onto similar ones without the scaffolding after.
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studymaths.bsky.social
NEW: A simple to use interactive table to practise multiplying and dividing with surds.

mathsbot.com/tools/surds
A screenshot of the resource with various cells filled with surds.
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mrlevmaths.bsky.social
Looked at Factorials with Year 10 in #MathsToday

Started off looking at odds and evens based on the Maths Challenge question in the bottom right.

I always love using Maths Challenge questions as a starting point for planning - this one was particularly fun 🧵1/4
Questions involving powers and factorials where students need to group things into odds and evens
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paddymacmahon.com
I saw your labels and thought these represented the actual areas (as in the area of region 1 is 1 unit, of region 2 is 2 units, etc...) which got me thinking that that sort of thing might make a nice problem. Impossible to get regions with those areas using a parabola, but I came up with this:
A parabola passing through the origin and a positive value on the x-axis, with a maximum point in the first quadrant. A straight line with positive gradient intersects the parabola at 2 points in the first quadrant. Vertical line segments are drawn from each of these intersection points to the x-axis, so the area enclosed by the parabola and the x-axis is divided into 4 regions. The left hand region has area 13, the right hand region has area 44 and the top region has area 8. The final region is labelled with a question mark.
catrionaagg.bsky.social
Last week Y8 had an answer which rounded to £66.67. Unexpectedly good AFL technique - I knew that loads of them must have got it wrong because there was nowhere near enough furtive giggling going on.
catrionaagg.bsky.social
Really enjoyed today’s Y7 lesson: linking function machines, telling the ‘story’ of a variable, substitution and sequences, in order to generate sequences from an expression. I love these lessons when it feels like everything comes together! #MathsToday
A machine labelled 7n+1. The inputs are the natural numbers 1,2,3,4,5. The outputs are the arithmetic/linear sequence 8,15,22,29,36
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benjamindickman.bsky.social
in #MathsToday: four different propositions, each proved by induction.

Fascinatingly, the first three (divisibility statements) were all proved using different but interchangeable methods.

The full statements from the image can be found below 👇🏻
see next post or tweet or whatever for the content of this image
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mrlevmaths.bsky.social
Did this with my year 13s in #Alevelmaths as a gentle warm up.

Getting them to guess what f(x) and g(x) was and to find each area depending on their functions was less gentle! #Mathstoday
catrionaagg.bsky.social
The main aim of this session was really to get teachers using this framework to discuss which representations they would use and when. But colouring in is always a bonus.

An interactive version of the representations is here: www.desmos.com/calculator/3...
Thinking carefully about representations

Teachers carefully select representations of mathematics to expose mathematical structure.
The intention is to support pupils in 'seeing' the mathematics, rather than using the representation as a tool to 'do' the mathematics.
These representations become mental images that students can use to think about mathematics, supporting them to achieve a deep understanding of mathematical structures and connections. Thinking carefully about representations

What and why?
What mathematical structure does the representation expose?
Why this representation, and not another?

When?
In what topics?
At what point within those topics?

How?
How will you use it?
How do you want students to use it?
catrionaagg.bsky.social
In #MathsToday I made 40 A Level teachers colour in representations of the binomial distribution.

This is your regular reminder that if you teach #ALevelMaths you should definitely try to join your local Maths Hub’s A Level Pedagogy group. There is some brilliant stuff going on all over England.
A quartet of representations of the binomial distributions. Screenshots from https://www.desmos.com/calculator/3ea50eafbc X ~B (10, 0.4)
Shade the diagrams to represent the probability
P(3 ≤X <6)
and draw a numberline. X~B(10,0.4)
Shade the diagrams to represent the probability P(3 ≤ X < 6) and draw a
numberline.

X ~ B(8, 0.7)
Which is larger:
P(X < 5) or P(X = 6)?

X~B(12,0.36)
P(X ≥ c) < 0.5
What is the smallest possible value of c? X~B(10,0.4)
Calculate the interquartile range of this distribution.
What is the mode?

X~B(8, 0.7)
P(X ≤ a) < 0.1
What is the largest possible value of a?
P(X ≥ b) < 0.1
What is the smallest possible value of b?

X~B(12,0.36)
P(X ≤ a) < 0.2
What is the largest possible value of a?
P(X ≥ b) < 0.2
What is the smallest possible value of b?
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mrs-p-maths.bsky.social
In #MathsToday I used this activity to gauge and challenge my pupils' understanding of parallel lines. Two were convinced b are parallel because they look like train tracks. Really made me think about the language we use when defining these things.
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jedediyah.com
In #MathsToday we worked on set theory.

Some resources came from: @draustinmaths.com
www.draustinmaths.com/set-notation...

And some of the exercises were pulled from @oscarlevin.com's Discrete Math (3rd edition)
discrete.openmathbooks.org/dmoi3/sec_in...
Screenshot of a problem set. 

1. Find the power set of A={x,y,z}. The power set is the set of all possible subsets. 

2. Given the diagram below: ...
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mathforge.org
Further Maths today: used the method of differences to prove the summation of squares formula, thus also foreshadowing MoD as a more general technique.

Unfortunately, only left myself 3 minutes to do the sum of cubes.

Did it in 2.

#MathsToday #UKMathsChat #ALevelMaths
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over-drawn.bsky.social
#mathstoday #alevelmaths Gave a reasonably challenging problem to my A level class today, namely (3^6-1)/(3^5+3^4+...+1) as a "starter", although I'm not so keen on the term. It provoked quite a bit of conversation and, although not my intention, led us down GPs before factorising. Lots of fun.
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mrlevmaths.bsky.social
Made this Circle Theorems and Trigonometry worksheet inspired by interwoven maths @nathanday.bsky.social in #Mathstoday

PPT and answers here: chelekmaths.com/most-recent-...
Worksheet involving circle theorems and trigonometry
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mrgwalton.bsky.social
In #mathstoday me and my Y13 FM students did a fun tarsia puzzle from @susanwhitehouse.bsky.social on De Moivre's theorem 😁
Quality resources as ever from Susan ✅
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peterrowlett.net
The call for peer reviewers is very real - if you teach maths at the upper end of school through to early university and are interested in maths content useful to people like you, please get in touch via [email protected] - thanks!

#MathsToday #UKMathsChat #ALevelMaths #MathToday #MathSky
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mathsmuse.bsky.social
Had an epiphany yesterday: teach angles questions as a series of reasons with numbers as an after thought instead of other way round.
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morrismaths359.bsky.social
#Mathstoday
Both of my year 9 classes did loads of substitution work today. Got the exercise from the foundation sumbooks 2002. They are available online as a pdf. Loads of questions if the students just need loads of practice.
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dr-hazel-maths.bsky.social
In #mathstoday, we started conic sections in FP1 with some model-making!
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morrismaths359.bsky.social
#Mathstoday
Year 11 looked at Magic squares today. Which leads onto factorising quadratics. Next lesson will be just factorising quadratics.
(For some reason rotating won't work)
Reposted by Catriona Agg
draustinmaths.com
✨New A-level resources from this week's Year 12 lessons on graphical inequalities, algebraic fractions and algebraic division. The new A-level section is slowly growing! www.draustinmaths.com/a-level
#MathsToday #ALevelMaths #UKMathsChat
A-level Maths task on finding the remainder when dividing a polynomial by a linear expression using algebraic long division. A-level Maths task on shading regions in two dimensions divided by linear and quadratic inequalities. A-level Maths tasks on (i) solving linear and quadratic inequalities graphically, and (ii) simplifying algebraic fractions either by splitting the fraction or by factorising.
Reposted by Catriona Agg
studymaths.bsky.social
Arbitrary and necessary mathematics.

One of those most important ideas to consider when planning and delivering maths lessons.

Here's my one-slide summary based on Dave Hewitt's article here:
www.lboro.ac.uk/media/media/...
Mathematical conventions must be explicitly taught, but mathematical ideas can be discovered or deduced.​
Dave Hewitt refers to these as arbitrary and necessary.

A couple of tasks to bring about awareness of the properties of odd and even numbers.