On Monday 22nd May the Maths teams of Bromsgrove School Mission Hills and Guanlan Central School met to share two masterclasses.

The first featured BMH’s Mila Liu teaching a 4th grade class of 62 students at GCS about critical path analysis aimed at investigating the optimal way to fry pancakes given the constraints of 1 frying pan able to cook 2 pancakes at once with a pancake needing to be fried for 3 minutes on each side to be cooked. Ms Mila started the lesson with a mini-whiteboard approach with all students solving arithmetic problems and showing their solutions after a count of ‘1, 2, 3’. This, and Ms Mila’s winning personality, instantly engaged students and built confidence on the part of the students and Ms Mila who quickly learnt what the students knew and could do. Next, the students worked in pairs simulating the frying of pancakes problem with Ms Mila’s specially prepared resources to gather data about how long it would take to cook 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …..n pancakes and how the cooking should be arranged to keep the total time as short as possible.

With some plenaries involving students sharing their findings the class were able to find a general rule for the time needed to fry n pancakes which is 3n once you have 2 more pancakes. With odd numbers of pancakes it is a little surprising that say 5 pancakes takes only 15 minutes rather than 18 minutes. With a strategy of always having 2 pancakes in the pan at any one time one can see how to do it.

The 2nd lesson with a different grade 4 class of 64 students entailed Ms Wen Ziqi teaching a very engaging lesson on tessellation or 2d space filling with identical tiles. After a fast moving video showing Escher’s ‘Pegasus’ horse tessellation based on glide translations of a quadrilateral and his tessellating ‘Frogs’ based on symmetric borrowing and paying back on equilateral triangular grid Ms Ziqi got the lesson underway having wetted students mathematical appetites.

First pairs of students were given envelopes of identical triangles, quadrilaterals or pentagons and asked to explore how they can be put together into a tessellation. Some minutes later the teacher shared with her webcam on the interactive board the tilings and asked students to come and explain why the tessellations worked. Any triangle it turned out can form a tessellation with multiple copies of itself and the angles a, b, c of the triangle can be found around a point twice making 360 around each point in the tessellation and leaving no gaps.

After the lessons the teachers all remarked how well the teachers had engaged the students with practical manipulatives and opportunities for students to share their thinking and reasoning. Of course there were suggestions about how one might ensure all students were on board with the ideas being shared and developed as well as ways to extend the mathematics next lesson.

On 23rd May 2023, Ms Jin and S7 students from BMH went to Guanlan Central School, where the S7 students had a biology experiment lesson with the grade 7 students of Guanlan Central School. The lesson was focused on "the changes of steamed buns in the mouth". Students actively participated in the lesson and shared their thoughts. They worked in groups to design the experiment by themselves. BMH students were able to design experiments in accordance with the basic principles of comparison and control of variables, which fully demonstrated their scientific literacy. The students took an active part in the experiment. Through this lesson, the students not only learn the digestion principle of steamed buns in the mouth, but more importantly, they have cultivated rigorous scientific thinking and the spirit of experimentation. I am sure that the children enjoyed this lesson very much.

Then, BMH students participated in the study of "observing the blood flow in the small fish caudal fin vessels". In this experiment lesson, the students first anaesthetized the small fish with anaesthesia, and then observed the blood flow in the vessels of the small fish's caudal fin under a microscope. The students were able to use the microscope proficiently and quickly find the field of view to observe, which fully demonstrates the students' good experimental operation ability and comprehensive practical ability. In addition, students can distinguish arteries, veins and capillaries under the microscope based on the knowledge they have learned. The learning in BMH is not limited to textbook knowledge, but also allows students to experience the joy of learning through observation and other senses.

On 25th May 2023, Science teachers from Guanlan Central School came to BMH for masterclass collaboration. Ms Kang from Guanlan Central School gave a Science lesson to BMH P5A students. In the lesson, Ms Kang started the lesson by talking about how she heated the cold milk taken out of the refrigerator to a suitable temperature for drinking in the morning. After that, she introduced the topic of the lesson - "objects with different temperatures in contact with each other". Then the students put ice water into hot water, and observed the phenomenon of objects with different temperatures in contact by regularly recording the temperature changes of ice water and hot water. In the end, the students drew a temperature change curve based on the recorded experimental data, and they could clearly see the temperature change after the contact between ice water and hot water. The students analysed why this phenomenon occurred through group discussion. I believe this is another experiment lesson which the students have gained a lot from.

On the same day, Ms Ji from BMH taught P4B students a Science lesson on "Know Several Common Rocks". Through observation, students learned that common rocks have different characteristics and mastered the scientific observation method through observation and comparison of granite, marble and sandstone. In the end, the students described and recorded characteristics of the rocks in scientific terms. The positive and confident attitude of the P4B students was praised by the Science teachers from Guanlan Central School.