I’m getting to that point in my life when I’m starting to think about what to do when I grow up.  It’s been 20 years since my teacher training  and I  thought it might be good to have some sort of career plan now! Probably in another 20 years I’ll have figured out what makes a good career plan. In the meantime I’m just enjoying the moment.  Maybe when I grow up I’ll stop feeling like my comfort zone is continually being challenged – but maybe then life will be too boring! And maybe being able to cope with being out of our comfort zone is what will enable our teaching to expand and embrace new ideas in order to enhance the learning of our pupils.  Next week will provide plenty of challenges to my comfort zone, I am sure, as well new ideas for using technology in my teaching.

So what did I do this week to challenge my comfort zone?  We had an animation week (I’ll blog about it tomorrow, as the final “cut” of our film is still to be finished in the morning – watch out for a new take on the Rapunze fairy tale). That was out of my comfort zone when we first used stop frame animation a few years ago, but it feels exceedingly comfortable now!

The challenge I set myself was to use the mathsmaps ideas from @tombarrett.  You can find out more about the maps he has set up here - they are well worth trying out with your class! We used them as starters during our maths lessons to rehearse and consolidate some of the language associated with shape.  Some of the questions I added to the map weren’t used this week, but are data handling questions to include in later lessons. See what you think, but a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building!  We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.

View Berlin in a larger map