Not exactly, but I was teaching this during a lesson about proving statements using algebra and using counter examples was a nice addition to this. After these non-maths statements we disproved some maths ones.

Thank you 🙏. I feel a trip to my local B&M is necessary this weekend. Only challenge will be only buying the advent calendar. Whenever I go in there I always walk out with the most random selection of things.

Omg, where did you get this???

Probably the first one because some pairs had considered decimal values for the base, others considered negatives, this then lead into a discussion on where the cut off point was, so considering 1 for the base.

I do something similar. I say "The 1 with a tan is sexy' and "The 1 in a cot is cosy" and accompany these with a cute photo of my son as a baby in his cot and this classically tanned sexy man 😂

2. When having class discussions, include the phrases “How can we say it better?” or “How can we say it like a Mathematician?”
3. Hand out the Talk Tactics sheets from Voice21 and direct them to the type of communicator you want them to be.
4. Have Discussion Guidelines to promote good listening.

So, what can we do to get all pupils engaging in effective discussions?
1. Make it explicit that pupils should be discussing what they notice, comparing their methods, making predictions, etc. You can do this by popping some sentence starters on the board.

Lower prior attainment is probably a fairer phrase and one used in my school but I fell into old habits with that post, not to mention I wouldn't have had enough characters to write it!

It probably is yes. But now you've made me question whether I should describe them differently. Can you suggest an alternative for those pupils who find maths difficult?

I've resorted to editing my lessons to make sure no 6 is followed by a 7 because of this but I keep missing odd ones. It's infuriating! Bring on the next ridiculous meme/slang trend 🥴

The first task helped to drill home the key features of each part, in particular it's location within the circle and this then helped with the second half of the lesson where they needed to justify their decision using correct vocabulary.

However if explaining to pupils I would refer to yellows as positives and reds as negatives

But it went want to do 1 - - 4 we don't have any reds to literally take away so we need to rewrite 1 as 1 with 4 zero pairs. Now we can remove the 4 reds and are left with 1+4 yellows, therefore 5. Hope that makes sense.