Explain this
50 Mathematics Lessons
How the publisher describes it:
“Colin Foster presents a series of rich tasks for use in the secondary classroom”
Review by Peter Hall
In brief:
I’ve used a couple of these tasks with classes and have enjoyed teaching them, and I think my students have both enjoyed them, and also learned from them. This — is a great resource for a department office and for ideas to be shared in advance of the next topic.
“Good tasks develop a life of their own and can be readily extended”
“Good tasks develop a life of their own and can be readily extended for learners who need further challenges.” The author writes this in his introduction and has produced a set of very good tasks indeed. The tasks take about a side, perhaps two, of A4 to explain and are very easy to understand yet offering a rich task for students to work on.
Each task has a summary box explaining the related topics — making it easy to find one for the current topic of study — and the materials needed — essential for preventing disaster as the lesson unfolds. There is also a related website hosting many additional resources.
Many tasks have extension ideas at the end — for example one task is about estimation — questions like “It is estimated that you can get 50,000 pennies into a cubic foot, a trillion would fill two St Paul’s Cathedrals” — leaving students to make suitable approximations and see how reasonable the statement is. Extensions for this task include thinking about powers of 10 — so tasks such as making a model of the solar system or finding numbers that are pretty close to each power of ten.
I’ve used a couple of these tasks with classes and have enjoyed teaching them, and I think my students have both enjoyed them, and also learned from them. This — is a great resource for a department office and for ideas to be shared in advance of the next topic.
Peter Hall • AST Mathematics, Imberhorne School, East Grinstead
50 Mathematics Lessons: Rich and Engaging Ideas for Secondary Mathematics
Colin Foster
Continuum, 2008
ISBN 978-1847061027
