Mathematical Power

What does mathematical power mean? In our view it is having strategies that help students to:

• Persevere
• Organise their thinking
• Work smart
• Explain their ideas 
• Risk take

And they need to Understand their thinking and take Pride in their achievements. All in all, they need to be able to POWER UP!

It is easy to shut down when faced with a challenging problem or some maths that as yet is just a bit tough. As educators we need to face the fact that we have not necessarily helped students to learn strategies for persistence and self regulation. Also as educators we may have been giving counter-productive messages based on:

• too little time allowed for thinking
• too little expectation that students can think if we leave them alone a little bit longer
• over emphasis on right answers, ticks and crosses and one particular method
• offering praise for effort (stickers etc)

rather than involving students in identifying for themselves and taking pride when they have powered up.

The purpose of our POWER UP pack is to offer busy teachers strategies for encouraging and making visible the types of thinking processes that can help students take control of themselves as learners.

The POWER UP posters work well alongside the STAR posters and bring the focus to the way a student is feeling at each stage of the STAR, providing support strategies for sticking with a task.

Teachers trialling the posters have made the following comments:

"I hadn’t really thought about helping my students POWER UP in this way before. The posters are really helpful and the students related to them easily."

"I wish I had been offered this earlier in life. I didn’t have stickability in maths and I haven’t tried to teach my students this kind of stickability either."

"I am going to print these 4 to a page and get my students to paste them into their problem solving books as a reminder."

A Symmetry Mini-Investigation

This investigation is inspired by the beautiful book Seeing Symmetry by Loreen Leedy. I really enjoyed the book and used it as a springboard into mini paper-folding symmetry investigations.

Often students can identify lines of symmetry when they are presented to them but have had limited experiences with deliberately planning folds and cuts to create symmetrical shapes Visualisation is central to spatial awareness and spatial sense. This activity builds on the paper folding activity presented on our Maths Problems for 2013 board of our Pinterest site.

The paper folding and cutting will provide experiences for students to:

•  visualise and predict the shapes and number of lines of symmetry that will result from a particular fold and cut
•  relate lines of symmetry to mirror images and reflections
• deliberately plan and explain how and where to fold the paper in order to make a specific shape or number of liens of symmetry including rotational symmetry (not as easy as it sounds

 There is a lesson plan on our site that you can download, but before you do that, have a look at these examples that the investigations can generate.

The idea is to start with the simple challenge of making one fold and cutting out a shape. At each stage, ask the children to predict what the cut-out shape will be and to name it if possible.

You'll see that I've used paper from an old fashion magazine. Well trends change, so there's no need to be looking back to the nineties for what to put on today!

I also quite liked the textures that the pages made.








The second stage is to make a second fold before you cut and this time, the shapes start to get quite complex.

I made this one up as a symmetry puzzle, with the folded paper stuck onto the sheet so that it could be opened up, one fold at a time.

And then there were three. This is my sting in the tail and it makes a great context for both naming strange shapes as well as looking for lines of symmetry.

At the end of the day, the resources are very simple and yet the outcomes are rigorous and educational valuable.
There is a sort of Arvind Gupta feel to the investigations - and if you haven't met Arvind yet, click his name to see a little bit of educational magic!