Curriculum Units and PD resources
Each Cornerstone Maths unit of work comprises carefully designed software that is hosted at www.cornerstonemaths.com.
The web-based software, is designed in html5 to run in the Chrome Browser and is openly accessible to anyone in the world.
The accompanying student work books, teacher guides and professional development resources (part of this PD Toolkit) are found on these web pages.
The PD resources are designed for schools that have already engaged with the face-to-face Cornerstone Maths professional development and, having piloted activities on a small scale in some classrooms, are ready to involve more teachers through some school-based PD.
Please contact us using the Get involved form if you would like support to adapt the PD Toolkit to your particular context.
This unit introduces the topic of linear functions to students in fourteen investigations that require a total of 12-16 teaching hours, which would normally be spread across the lower secondary phase.
It shows how linear functions can be used to model situations, such as motion or money, and solve problems involving a constant rate of change. Informal uses of concepts are introduced to compare rates visually (steeper/faster, for example). It also explores methods for writing equations based on situations, tables and graphs, and the connections between them.
This unit introduces the topic of geometric similarity to students in twelve investigations that require a total of 8-12 teaching hours, which might be spread across the lower secondary phase.
It shows how the variant and invariant properties of different figures can be used to determine geometric similarity. Informal notions of similarity are used within the context of non-similar shapes to highlight the necessary and minimum conditions for similarity. These ideas are extended to provide an introduction to trigonometric ratios from this geometric starting point.
This unit introduces the topic of algebraic generalisation to students in five investigations that require a total of 4-6 teaching hours and is ideally taught early in the lower secondary phase.
It supports students to understand and express algebraic generalisations arising from how they visualise the structure of a figural pattern. Students work in a dynamic environment to visualize and generate figural patterns and write algebraic expressions for those patterns. The activities encourage students to identify structures in the patterns to make sense of the letters and numbers in an algebraic expression.
One of the main goals of the unit is to help students develop a solid understanding of variables as representing quantities that vary instead of simply unknowns to be discovered.
