Video: More maths activities for directed number

Returning with her first Teacher video for 2023, Holly Wedd shares 3 more activities she uses in her classroom to help students learn about directed number.

Holly is Head Teacher Mathematics at Orara High School in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Explaining the first activity, she says her Faculty has been changing the way in which they approach their questioning technique with students with the help of the website openmiddle.com.

‘So, rather than giving them a worksheet with 20 different directed number questions on there, they’re only actually being presented with one or 2 questions per lesson. And the questions are then created by the students themselves.’ She adds that she’s been using the technique with her students in year 7 all the way through to her year 12 advanced class.

The second activity is called CSI Investigation, which Holly sourced from Clarke Creative. ‘Students are tasked with becoming the crime scene investigators in this story. They are told that there is an evil group called the Mathmagicians who are trying to build a world-conquering device ... Students are then to work through the clues to try and unravel who the Mathmagicians may be and how we can stop them … as the clues progress they increase in complexity and really get the kids thinking critically about the steps they need to take to find the correct answer.’

The final activity is one created by Holly called Number Match which uses a simple resource – a deck of playing cards. ‘It’s a really fun little activity that I have found that is good to use at the end of a period for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, just to really be able as a teacher to assess your students’ genuine understanding of adding and multiplying their positive and negative numbers together.’

You can find out more about each activity, and the resources, in today’s video.

Access the resources from this video:

Activity 1 - Worksheet & Link

Activity 2 - Link: https://clarkcreativeeducation.com/

Activity 3 - Match My Number Worksheet

WATCH VIDEO

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss a video.