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What is it?

Finding useful, engaging homeworks is quite a tricky challenge. I often find the difficulty lies in striking the right balance between the regular practise of key skills that students clearly need to achieve mastery in a given topic or concept, versus the variety that the need to not only deepen their understanding but also to stop them dying of boredom. This PRET homework on averages strikes that balance perfectly. PRET stands for Practise, Recall, Extend and Think. As you can see from the resource itself, students have to practise the basics of mean, median, mode and range, before being stretched, challenged to do some further research into the topic, and come up with a memory aiding device. This would be a challenging homework, but one which would ensure all the fundamental skills are in place, whilst still offering variety, stretch and challenge.

How can it be used?

No prizes for guessing that I would use this resource as a homework. And indeed, I did for my lovely Year 8 class who found it very enjoyable (well, as enjoyable as any maths homework can be). I found it to be a really good differentiating task as the more able students had the opportunity to push themselves and demonstrate their creativity. Once I try them out with a few more PRET style homeworks, Ii am going to gamble in getting them to create their own for the next topic we do. This might be a bit beyond them, but it is worth a try!

Thank you for sharing!

Craig Barton

 

Download Averages Homework

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