I have had the pleasure of using the ICCAMS lessons and in particular Boat Hire

It looks at comparing two different boat hire companies and every time i have used it with a class I have learnt something new. Students never fail to surprise me with their ideas.

I decided with my low attaining year 10 class that i would pose the following question (I left my ICCAMS hand book at home!)

Abbey boats charges an initial fee of £10 and £1 per hour for using their boats

Barking Barges charges an initial fee of £5 and £2 per hour for using their boats

Miss  Konstantine wants to hire a boat, which should she use?

I gave students time to ask questions and make sense of the question i had posed.

Here are there initial thoughts:

I found the last students work quite interesting. He had used a rather nice way of recording the information for 1-5 hours. He was also able to determine which boat company to use for 1-4 hours and that both companies were the same price for 5 hours.

We used his work to move forward with the question and we discussed some of the other comments students raised at this point in the lesson.

We moved on to plotting the two boat hire companies and students naturally started to question. I asked for the class to share any questions they had about the graphs and if anyone wanted to, they could comment on what they noticed or thought.

Below are some of the comments and questions students had at this stage

I made the following problem to be used with my year 9. The boxed value was an error and they had to correct it. It also gave students a chance to discuss misconceptions.

I tried to include one where students used the Scale factor for length as 2 and the SF for area as 2

One where students correctly worked out SF for volume but then the length was halved not doubled,

Another question I included had the SF for area being used on a volume

then a question with SF for volume being used instead of area.

I then started to consider some more challenging questions that combined several ideas involving similar shapes, Scales factors and proportion.

Similar Shapes