Ideas and resources for teaching secondary school mathematics
When you get promoted to a new role in a school, whether it's as Key Stage Coordinator, Head of Department, Head of Year, or a Senior Leader, you probably don't get any training on how to do that role. If you're lucky the previous job holder is around to show you the ropes, but sometimes you just have to wing it, all by yourself. For the last couple of years I've been increasingly keen to
Welcome to my 201st gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Volumes of RevolutionMy excellent A level student Samarth made a website volumesofrevolution.co.uk. He has very kindly shared it so that A level Further Maths teachers can use it in lessons when teaching volumes of revolution. The website is very easy to use. You can
Back in 2018 I was asked to write a couple of guest blog posts for La Salle. I wrote this post about vulgar fractions and another post about factorising non-monics. These posts no longer appear on La Salle's website so I'm re-posting them here. *********************My Longman maths textbook from the 1960s tells me about the ‘Fraction family tree’. Its members are the brothers Vulgar
Back in 2018 I was asked to write a couple of guest blog posts for La Salle. I wrote this post about factorising non-monics and another post about vulgar fractions. These posts no longer appear on La Salle's website so I'm re-posting them here. *************Factorising a quadratic when the coefficient of x2 doesn't equal one (a 'non-monic') is apparently one of the more challenging skills
Welcome to my 200th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. MathsPadMathsPad's May and July updates includes lots of fantastic new resources.Their Topic Key Facts Sheets are designed in a two-column question and answer format, so that pupils can self-test by covering up the second column. Very helpful for revision at Key Stage 3 and 4,
Welcome to my 199th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. TrimensionFollowing on from the release of Vectorama (Gems 197) and Graphiti (Gems 196), Neil Kendall has completed a third project 'Trimension'. This tool allows the construction of 3D models to help illustrate 3D Pythagoras and trigonometry problems. The key feature is the
I like the summer term. At my school Year 11 are in lessons until half term, but Year 13 went on study leave on 8th May, which means my teaching timetable has already lightened and will soon reduce further (this year I teach both Year 11 Maths and Year 11 Further Maths so I'll gain a lot of time when Year 11 leave). With all the gained hours in a day you would have thought the summer
Welcome to my 198th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. GCSE Question DistributionThanks to Jamie Frost for producing a detailed breakdown of skills that have appeared on past GCSE papers. Other websites have analyses by topic, but Jamie has such an extensive database of past exam questions that he has been able to produce a
Mathsconf40 took place in Derby yesterday. I thought it might be helpful to write a quick post to update my readers on some stuff I learnt.I enjoyed Joe Berwick's (@berwickmaths) session on teaching statistics at A level. My degree was in Statistics at UCL (I actually did SORMS, which is similar to MORSE at Warwick - a popular course amongst our Year 13s) so I teach a lot of statistics, including
Welcome to my 197th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Dr Austin A Level RevisionIt's always great to see new Dr Austin resources. Latest additions include a Harder Reflections Practice Grid and a Negative Enlargements Practice Grid, plus some new A level resources on Logs, Hyperbolics and Polar Coordinates. An A Level Revision
Welcome to my 196th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Make it Full Marks@acutelearning shared a great resource called 'Aiming for A*: Make it full marks'. This is an A level resource made using AQA papers but is relevant for other exam boards too. In this resource students are presented with partially correct answers
Welcome to my 195th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Maths Rocketgcsemathsrocket.co.uk is a new website packed full of useful resources. There are over one hundred maths worksheets with answers and accompanying videos. For an example, check out this vectors worksheet. I really like the detailed atomisation of skills
Welcome to my 194th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. 1st Class Maths It's great to see more A level resources from 1st Class Maths. There's now a full collection of excellent exam style questions for the statistics content of AS level maths, and now he's started to add mechanics exam style questions too. Unlike
I'm writing this post at the request of a colleague. To explain what happened, I need to start by explaining what Solution Bank is. If you teach Edexcel A Level Maths or Further Maths and you make use of the Pearson textbooks, then your students are probably very familiar with Solution Bank. It's a set of PDFs that have full worked solutions to every question in the textbooks. Solution Bank
Welcome to my 193rd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. 1st Class Maths I'm always happy to see new resources from 1st Class Maths. The latest is a set of exam style questions (in both AQA and Edexcel style) on reverse percentages.Resources for compound interest and loci are coming soon.2. Certificate in Further MathsAQA's
Every year I set a development priority for my department, and this becomes the focus of our 'DPD' sessions throughout the year (DPD is 'department professional development'). We focused on challenge in the past two years and I think we've done a great job with that - we got 17% Grade 9 at GCSE last year (we're a totally non-selective school and for comparison, the other comprehensive schools in
Welcome to my 192nd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Hannah KettleHannah Kettle is making worksheets and accompanying videos to review each unit of the GCSE Maths course. Unit 1 Higher (Number) is now on her website with the accompanying worksheet. Hannah has a great idea - these videos and resources would be brilliant for
There are lots of good reasons to offer additional maths qualifications to Key Stage 4 students on top of their standard Maths GCSE. As far as I know, maths is the only subject that has add-ons available. There's no Further English, Further Physics, Further History... our subject is an anomaly. There are many students who adore maths, and often the same students are incredibly good at maths, and
Welcome to my 191st gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Building BlocksThere are loads of resources available for teaching high attainers but relatively few resources that are specifically designed for teaching secondary school students who find maths very difficult. MathsPad is already one of the best sources of tasks for
Over the last few years a lot of teachers have requested a library of resources for GCSE Statistics. I finally made one! I haven't taught this qualification in full but I revised it this year with my Year 11 Further Maths option class. Now I'm starting to get to grips with the specification, and given the increasing number of schools delivering this qualification, it seems like a good time to
I’ve been out and about over the last couple of weeks, doing my usual rounds of the summer term maths events. I’ve been quiet on my blog in recent months, partly because relatively few new resources have been shared on social media, and partly because my day-to-day workload continues to be relentless, leaving very little time for hobbies like blogging - I’m sure many other Heads of Maths and
Welcome to my 190th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Resources Created Using AII posted about @DGRAIMaths's resources in my post AI Maths Resources last year. His website aimaths.weebly.com has now been updated with a new set of resources covering histograms, cumulative frequency graphs, box plots and line graphs.Duncan uses
Welcome to my 189th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers. As exam season is fast approaching, there's a revision theme in today's post!1. MathsPad It's always great to see new resources on my favourite website MathsPad. In March they published a number of new tasks including GCSE revision worksheets. This includes
This is just a quick post to share a couple of revision resources I've recently made.I'm delighted that the Easter holidays have arrived but I think I'll need to spend a bit of time over the break creating new revision resources to use this summer. My school opened seven years ago so this is the first time we'll have A level exams. And we've been running our new option block course (GCSE
Welcome to my 188th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Mr Chapman MathsThank you to @dalechapman.bsky.social for sharing some great new scaffolded resources.The first one is a backwards faded task for recurring decimals. The scaffolding makes the topic highly accessible - this task could be used before students