Regents Review Spring '18

The Regents Review Spring 2018

DEPARTMENTAL NEWS

Numeracy Ninjas

progress in mathematics and, consequently, enable them to face the challenges of the new GCSE with increased confidence. Students in Year 8 now have a weekly Numeracy Ninjas lesson within their tutor time to continue their hard work from Year 7 on Numeracy Ninjas and it will be interesting to see the impact of this work within their maths lessons. This term we are celebrating the following students from 7BY and 7GY who have been working really hard on their Ninjas and have been improving week on week.

This is an initiative which was introduced last year and one which we have implemented to help improve students’ basic skills. Students in Year 7 have really enjoyed tackling Numeracy Ninjas as their daily starter and are keen to see which belt they have achieved. Each year the GCSE examiner’s report highlights the impact of poor basic skills in leading to errors and we feel that the work we are doing, coupled with students’ own independent work to improve their times tables, multiplication and division, will be key in enabling students to make good Maths Innovative Teaching

As a department we strive to teach engaging and relevant lessons to support student learning. This term Year 10 have been looking at surface area of 3D shapes. As part of this topic, students were involved in an orange investigation to work out how the formula of surface area of a sphere, students drew around their oranges on mini white boards and had to work out how many circles they could fill with the peel of the orange, then apply what they knew about calculating area of a circle. When Year 10 students think about area of a sphere in the future I am sure they will remember peeling oranges.

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