About

The blogging and tweeting worlds are full of people sharing great ideas to engage and activate students in mathematics classrooms. The biggest wish I hear when I share some of these activities with workshop participants is that there be one place where teachers could go to find them, linked to our curriculum.

With that in mind, this site is to be a repository of engaging activities linked to the WNCP High School Math Curriculum, which suggests that teachers should “orchestrate the experiences” from which students extract meaning.

While my work is primarily in Alberta, I will attempt to link the material to the equivalent courses in the other western provinces.

I hope this site will grow. I need your help to make that happen. I’d love all this good stuff to be in one place, with no password, fees, or moodles required. I have mined and linked here the things I have found online. Many of the people who happen across this site will have their own great activities, but no forum for sharing them unless they blog or tweet. I hope you will send me those activities. Please forward them to me using the contact information to the side.

Please don’t send me multiple choice tests. You can find that stuff elsewhere.

If you send me a cool performance assessment that engages students, I’d be happy to post it.

Please don’t send me worksheets with 100 practice questions. You can find that stuff elsewhere.

If you send me a worksheet that is engaging and interesting like this one, or that involves a process to get kids talking about math like these ones, then I’ll post it.

Please don’t send me a standard notes package. You can get that stuff elsewhere.

If you send me a notes package designed to get students talking to each other and learning from each other and otherwise exploring like this one, then I’d love to post it.

Anything of yours that is posted here will be credited to you in whatever manner you indicate.

For all courses, the activities on this site  are sorted into five broad categories.

  • Introductory Activities – Activities that could be used to introduce a topic and that will hopefully engage students in that topic.
  • Learning Activities – Activities designed to have the students learn a topic with the teacher acting more as a guide than a lecturer.
  • Problem Solving Activities – Problems presented in compelling ways.
  • Review Activities – Review activities assume that students already know something, and need to practice it a little. These activities help students review a topic in a more engaged way than practice tests or worksheets. Most are designed in some way to have students communicating with each other.
  • Performance Assessments – Assessment tasks intended to be summative in nature that put the student in an authentic role and that are more open than traditional assessments.

The following courses will be addressed here. Their Alberta name is first, and the WNCP name is in brackets. The courses are identical in all cases except Alberta’s Math 20-2 and Math 30-2 differing slightly from Foundations of Mathematics 11 and 12 elsewhere in the WNCP.

Math 10-3 (Apprenticeship and Workplace Mathematics 10)

Math 10C (Foundations of Mathematics and Pre-Calculus 10)

Math 20-3 (Apprenticeship and Workplace Mathematics 11)

Math 20-2 (Alberta)

Foundations of Mathematics 11 (Everywhere else in WNCP)

Math 20-1 (Pre-Calculus 11)

Math 30-3 (Apprenticeship and Workplace Mathematics 12)

Math 30-2 (Alberta)

Foundations of Mathematics 12 (Everywhere else in WNCP)

Math 30-1 (Pre-Calculus 12)