Resourceaholic: 5 Maths Gems #184

January 2, 2025

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Pleased New 12 months and welcome to my 184^th gems submit. That is the place I share among the newest information, concepts and assets for maths lecturers.

1. Dr Austin

2. MathsPad

3. 1st Class Maths

One other one in every of my favorite web sites is 1stclassmaths.com. I exploit this rather a lot when instructing AQA Stage 2 Certificates in Additional Maths, and we additionally direct our 12 months 11 college students to it for GCSE Revision. The movies and assets are all actually top quality. Our college students additionally discover the matters frequency web page fascinating! And I’ll undoubtedly be utilizing the A stage assets once I train statistics this time period.

Latest additions to the GCSE revision web page (which has each an AQA and Edexcel model) embrace questions on quantity and space, sequences and fractions. I’ve added all of those to my useful resource libraries.

4. Issues to Memorise

Since Method Sheets had been reintroduced at GCSE we have had college students asking whether or not we’ve got a listing of details and formulae that they nonetheless have to memorise. I’ve lastly received spherical to creating one thing for the scholars at my college. I’ve tried to make it succinct and it is definitely not an exhaustive record of every thing they should be taught, however it does present a abstract of the important thing details that they’ll get dad and mom or associates to check them on. College students should be fluent in all these details to allow them to focus their efforts on reasoning and drawback fixing.

You’ll be able to obtain these for each Greater and Basis tier (together with editable variations) right here in your 12 months 11 college students. I used to be a bit uncertain about sharing these paperwork as a result of I did not make each picture myself – I simply discovered issues on Google photos that I believed had been notably clear. Apologies and thanks to the creators of the images I’ve used. Should you spot any errors, please let me know.

5. Integration

I very a lot get pleasure from Catriona Agg’s posts on Bluesky. A pleasant instance is her latest submit about integration utilizing trigonometric substitutions. I am utilizing this with my Additional Maths class subsequent week.

I additionally cherished her latest submit about graph sketches.

I additionally actually like Catriona’s matter map for trigonometry, which helps college students get a way of the place their studying suits with what they’ve achieved earlier than and what’s coming subsequent.

I do one thing comparable in my classes – for instance here is a slide I present once I train factorising in 12 months 10:

Updates

Listed below are a extra few belongings you is likely to be enthusiastic about:

I acquired an electronic mail from Head of Maths Ben Plowman a couple of every day puzzle based mostly on the ‘Knight’s Transfer’ in chess. Ben’s son made this intelligent little recreation. I feel my readers will get pleasure from it: knightpuzzle.com.
Tom Francome’s group has been busy digitising Don Steward’s paper notes and they’re now accessible on Don’s fantastic weblog. Learn Tom’s submit about this right here. I’ve actually loved studying Don’s notes – they’re filled with treasures. New lecturers who haven’t but found Don Steward’s duties – please drop every thing and discover them now.
OCR have lately revealed some posts that may assist lecturers develop their A stage curriculum data. In Amy Dai’s submit A Stage Maths and Additional Maths: the significance of correct vocabulary in statistics there’s actually useful data on the place candidates go incorrect in exams. And Steve Walker has written an awesome submit on Present That questions. These posts and extra might be accessed by means of OCR’s web site.
Paul Rowlandson revealed a brand new weblog submit: ‘Taxing Duties with Turtles‘ which seems at a number of geometry issues and investigations that may be explored by utilizing a small quantity of coding.
The Joint Convention of the Mathematical Topic Associations takes place in Loughborough on 14th to sixteenth April 2025 – try futureproofingthecurriculum.org.uk for data.

Emptiness

Come and work with me! I’ll have not less than one emptiness for September and I am going to undoubtedly want somebody who can train 12 months 13 mechanics. We now have a improbable uptake for A stage Maths and Additional Maths and I’ve a superb group instructing it, however we want yet one more A Stage maths instructor to affix us. I will probably be promoting quickly – hopefully in January – so watch this area. We’re positioned in South London. Behaviour and attitudes are wonderful so our college students are a pleasure to show – this 12 months our Maths Progress 8 rating was 1.22 (knowledge accessible right here). This is an image a few of my pretty group of maths lecturers having fun with our Christmas occasion! Should you’re enthusiastic about becoming a member of us, please get in contact.

An apology for my absence
You may need seen that I do not weblog anyplace close to as a lot as I used to. That is consistently on my thoughts. I actually need to maintain running a blog, I simply battle to seek out the time and inspiration lately. My job grew this 12 months and though I find it irresistible, it may be all-consuming at instances. Plus parenting busy daughters in 12 months 6 and eight does not go away a lot time for hobbies liking running a blog!

My inspiration for content material is critically missing too. There was a mass exodus of maths lecturers from Twitter over summer season, and it is now fairly useless there when it comes to posts about assets. There’s now a pleasing neighborhood of maths lecturers on Bluesky, a few of them sharing pretty concepts and insights regularly utilizing the hashtag #mathstoday, however for some purpose I simply can’t get into it. I’ve tried. And it isn’t simply social media offering few concepts for weblog posts – I am solely instructing Years 11, 12 and 13 this 12 months – I discover that once I train Key Stage 3 I’ve far more to put in writing about. My timetable is generally A stage, however having had a seven 12 months break from instructing A stage, I would not be so daring as to provide recommendation about Sixth Type pedagogy.

However I have never completely disappeared. Within the background I do nonetheless add assets to my useful resource libraries to ensure they’re saved up-to-date. You’ll be able to entry my useful resource libraries right here. And I typically get emails from lecturers and Heads of Maths asking for recommendation which I am all the time blissful to supply. And I do have some issues I plan to weblog about later within the 12 months – for instance I feel there is likely to be some curiosity in how we construction the instructing of our new possibility topic (which mixes GCSE Statistics with Certificates in Additional Maths) however I ought to wait till our first set of outcomes are on this summer season earlier than I write about that!

So briefly – sorry for my absence from each running a blog and social media. I’m nonetheless right here within the background, and I hope to see a lot of you at conferences this 12 months.

I’ll go away you with this pretty little puzzle from ‪@1stclassmaths.bsky.social‬.