Happy holiday all. For those who missed the session this morning, we covered bearings and the nets of common shapes including cuboids and cylinders.

You can download and print a two side handout with short questions on perimeter, area and volume. It needs Adobe Acrobat reader (for PDF files) but most computers have that installed.

Watch this for an overview of circle areas with examples. Be prepared to pause the video and reach for your calculator…

I’m assuming you know about the circumference of a circle!

The YouTube walks you through the formulas for the area of a rectangle, a parallelogram and a triangle. I’ll pop a quiz here sometime before Friday.

Note: we are going ahead with the Algebra coursework now!

You can download a Word file that has the names of all the common shapes and colour drawings of the shapes. If you can’t read Word files, let me know and I will convert the handout to PDF.

You need to be able to recognise shapes like kite, rhombus, parallelogram and so on. As I mentioned this morning, there will always be a diagram with an exam question that involves a property of a shape.

Some people learn best through verbal description, and some through visual reasoning. There is a ‘learning styles questionnaire‘ that you can do if you want to. The VARK questionnaire is used in our 6th form centre to help younger students reflect on their learning. You need to read the FAQ to understand what the results mean!

I made an ‘audio lesson’ about areas and perimenters for a student who was on shift work last year. To use this lesson, you need to

• Print out this one side handout with diagrams
• Listen to this 15 minute audio file

The audio file is in mp3 format and can be downloaded to your computer (right click over link, save file as…), and you need to draw on the handout and to use a calculator when listening.

I think that 14 minutes is a bit long for an audio lesson. I put the visuals into a YouTube file these days. See what you think.

Last Friday, we looked at multiplying out quadratic expressions like

(x + 2)(x + 3) = x² + 3x + 2x + 6 = x² + 5x + 6.

As the BBC Bitesize page explains, you multiply everything in the first bracket by the things in the second bracket, so you obtain four terms. Two of the terms are x terms, and so these can be added together. One way of remembering to multiply out the terms so you capture them all is FOIL

• First - the first term in each bracket, x multiplied by x gives x²
• Outer - the first thing in the first multiplied by the last in the second bracket, x times 3 in this case
• Inner - the 2 times x in this case
• Last - the 2 times the 3 in this case

As always you need to watch the signs!

Try this Web quiz - check your multiplying out of quadratics. A new window will appear with a question and four possible answers, choose the answer you think is right, you should get some feedback. If no questions appear, you need to check that JavaScript is ‘permitted’ by your Web browser.

Close the window after trying the quiz. When you re-load the quiz, you will get a different random choice of 10 questions from 20 questions. I wrote the quiz myself using Hot Potatoes, a free quiz generator program written by a Canadian English teacher.

…to all those taking the AQA Module 1 and Module 3 exams on Monday!

You might want to take some time out tonight (March 3rd) to look at the Moon around 10:40 pm as there is a Lunar eclipse. The Moon appears bright because of the Sunlight reflected from the surface. Tonight, the Moon crosses through the shadow of the Earth. The surface will go darker and redder - the whole event lasts about an hour. There are a couple of lunar eclipses every year but not always visible from the UK. They are less dramatic than Solar eclipses but still visually appealing.