Our saviour this year for activities which are always fun and full of learning opportunities has been the one and only NRICH. NRICH is bursting at the seams with all its rich activities, however you need to have some kind of system for choosing what to use in the classroom. Here are a few suggestions to help you use the site effectively:
1) Know your class and what is relevant to them - narrow your search using the Key Stage feature so you don't end up spending hours searching through all the resources. The curriculum mapping documents might also be helpful when narrowing down your search.
2) Consider where your stars fall - do you want students to be challenged from the offset? Do you want them to be able to start confidently before the challenge sets in? Remember this when looking at the number of stars on an activity, which also links in to point 1) and knowing your class.
3) Consider the words at the bottom of the page: these are a brief overview of the topics covered in the activity. The bigger the word, the more relevant it is. This can also be useful to quickly recognise more obscure links (the smaller words) which can be used for extension tasks or to take the activity in a different direction.
In order to maximise the use of an NRICH problem or activity here are a few suggestions to guide you to using the activity effectively:
1) Always decide the areas you would like to concentrate on in the NRICH activity beforehand. Nothing can be worse during a lesson than when as the teacher you don't know which mathematical concepts are being connected or explored.
2) Think about what you would like the pupils to get out of the lesson. Do you want the pupils to connect certain areas of mathematics? Are the pupils going to improve their investigative skills? Is the aim of the activity to discover a new concept? Remember: do not feel like you have to be a slave to the activity; you are allowed to edit them so they fit your goals appropriately.
3) So, you now have your activity and the goal for your students, the next thing to consider is the difficulties your pupils might have with the NRICH activity. This is the time to hit the "Teachers' Resources" page associated to most NRICH problems. The page often gives possible approaches to the problem, key questions, possible extensions and possible support.
4) Once you have decided on the activity, the purpose for your students and possible ways to support the pupils at key points, next is the opening. How do you introduce the activity? There are many ways to do this! Some investigations are best started by simply stating the question, others need some preamble in order to get the students started. What is important in the opening is to to keep it
short and to the point.
5) Whilst the students are starting with the activity, it can be good to let them explore before offering any help. Knowing when to step in and help students is a tricky one. One approach (which we love!) is to provide hint envelopes, so that it is the pupils who decide when they would like the help and how much.
6) Now, you have been going for a bit of time in the lesson, some pupils have some great ideas and you think the class could benefit from the sharing of the ideas. How do you bring the class together? Do you need the whole class to be paying attention or will you collect individual ideas from pupils or groups and display them somewhere in the classroom?
7) You have been going for nearly the whole lesson now, some pupils are still on the original activity and some on to various extension to the activity. You would like to have some bringing together of the class for the final moments of this lesson, how do you go about doing this? Do you warn the students that you are going to stop them to allow them to come to a point that they are happy
with?
8) Don't be afraid to let an activity go on for as long as the students are gaining something from it.
9) Finally, enjoy it. NRICH activities are as enriching for the teachers as they are for the students.