Happy New Year and welcome to my 184th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. Dr Austin
Thank you to Amanda Austin for continuing to share fantastic free resources for Key Stages 3 to 5. I've been adding these to my resource libraries. Recent additions include Simplifying Expressions True or False, Parallel or Not Parallel Activity and Drawing Line Segments with a Given Gradient, plus lots of A level mechanics tasks.
2. MathsPad
MathsPad have recently published some really lovely new resources for subscribers including significant figures puzzles that involve a lot of reasoning and worksheets on 2D and 3D Shapes. They have also published new textbook chapters for Year 11 packed full of fantastic tasks including chapters on area and volume, real life graphs and measures, inequalities and rounding and estimation.
There's also a new interactive tool for exploring the triangle inequality.
3. 1st Class Maths
Another one of my favourite websites is 1stclassmaths.com. I use this a lot when teaching AQA Level 2 Certificate in Further Maths, and we also direct our Year 11 students to it for GCSE revision. The videos and resources are all really high quality. Our students also find the topic frequencies page fascinating! And I will definitely be using the A level resources when I teach statistics this term.
Recent additions to the GCSE revision page (which has both an AQA and Edexcel version) include questions on volume and area, sequences and fractions. I have added all of these to my resource libraries.
4. Things to Memorise
Since Formula Sheets were reintroduced at GCSE we've had students asking whether we have a list of facts and formulae that they still need to memorise. I've finally got round to making something for the students at my school. I've tried to make it succinct and it's certainly not an exhaustive list of everything they need to learn, but it does provide a summary of the key facts that they can get parents or friends to test them on. Students need to be fluent in all these facts so they can focus their efforts on reasoning and problem solving.
You can download these for both Higher and Foundation tier (including editable versions) here for your Year 11 students. I was a bit unsure about sharing these documents because I didn't make every image myself - I just found things on Google images that I thought were particularly clear. Apologies and thank you to the creators of the pictures I have used. If you spot any mistakes, please let me know.
5. Integration
I very much enjoy Catriona Agg's posts on Bluesky. A nice example is her recent post about integration using trigonometric substitutions. I'm using this with my Further Maths class next week.
I also like Catriona's topic map for trigonometry, which really helps students get a sense of where their learning fits with what they've done before and what's coming next.
I do something similar in my lessons - for example here's a slide I show when I teach factorising to Year 10:
Updates
Vacancy
Here are a more few things you might be interested in:
- I received an email from Head of Maths Ben Plowman about a daily puzzle based on the 'Knight's Move' in chess. Ben's son made this clever little game. I think my readers will enjoy it: knightpuzzle.com.
- Tom Francome's team has been busy digitising Don Steward’s paper notes and they are now available on Don's wonderful blog. Read Tom's post about this here. I've really enjoyed reading Don's notes - they are full of treasures. New teachers who have not yet discovered Don Steward's tasks - please drop everything and explore them now.
- OCR have recently published some posts that will help teachers develop their A level curriculum knowledge. In Amy Dai's post A Level Maths and Further Maths: the importance of accurate vocabulary in statistics there's really helpful information on where candidates go wrong in exams. And Steve Walker has written a great post on Show That questions. These posts and more can be accessed through OCR's website.
- Paul Rowlandson published a new blog post: 'Taxing Tasks with Turtles' which looks at a selection of geometry problems and investigations that can be explored by using a small amount of coding.
- The Joint Conference of the Mathematical Subject Associations takes place in Loughborough on 14th to 16th April 2025 - check out futureproofingthecurriculum.org.uk for information.
Come and work with me! I will have at least one vacancy for September and I'll definitely need someone who can teach Year 13 mechanics. We have a fantastic uptake for A level Maths and Further Maths and I have a brilliant team teaching it, but we need one more A Level maths teacher to join us. I will be advertising soon - hopefully in January - so watch this space. We are located in South London. Behaviour and attitudes are excellent so our students are a pleasure to teach - this year our Maths Progress 8 score was 1.22 (data available here). Here's a picture some of my lovely team of maths teachers enjoying our Christmas party! If you're interested in joining us, please get in touch.
An apology for my absence
You might have noticed that I don't blog anywhere near as much as I used to. This is constantly on my mind. I really want to keep blogging, I just struggle to find the time and inspiration these days. My job grew this year and although I love it, it can be all-consuming at times. Plus parenting busy daughters in Year 6 and 8 doesn't leave much time for hobbies like blogging!
You might have noticed that I don't blog anywhere near as much as I used to. This is constantly on my mind. I really want to keep blogging, I just struggle to find the time and inspiration these days. My job grew this year and although I love it, it can be all-consuming at times. Plus parenting busy daughters in Year 6 and 8 doesn't leave much time for hobbies like blogging!
My inspiration for content is seriously lacking too. There was a mass exodus of maths teachers from Twitter over summer, and it's now pretty dead there in terms of posts about resources. There's a pleasant community of maths teachers on Bluesky, some of them sharing lovely ideas and insights on a regular basis using the hashtag #mathstoday, but for some reason I just can't get into it. I have tried. And it's not just social media providing few ideas for blog posts - this year I'm only teaching Years 11, 12 and 13 - I find that when I teach Key Stage 3 I have much more to write about. My timetable is mostly Sixth Form, but having had a seven year break from teaching A level, I wouldn't be so bold as to give advice about A level pedagogy.
But I haven't totally disappeared. In the background I do still add resources to my resource libraries to make sure they are kept up-to-date. You can access my resource libraries here. And I often get emails from teachers and Heads of Maths asking for advice which I'm always happy to provide. And I do have some things I plan to blog about later in the year - for example I think there might be some interest in how we structure the teaching of our new option subject (which combines GCSE Statistics with Certificate in Further Maths) but I should wait until our first set of results are in this summer before I write about that!
So in short - sorry for my absence from both blogging and social media. I am still here in the background, and I hope to see many of you at conferences this year.
I will leave you with this lovely little puzzle from @1stclassmaths.bsky.social.
I will leave you with this lovely little puzzle from @1stclassmaths.bsky.social.
Thank you for reading, and all the best for the start of the Spring term.
