5 Maths Gems #185

Welcome to my 185^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Admissions Tests and A Level Resources 

Every year in the Spring Term ‪@ecrmaths runs a series of information sessions for her Year 12 students on the main STEM admissions tests (TMUA, MAT, STEP, PAT and ESAT). She has shared her slides for her 2025 sessions. This is incredibly generous and helpful of Emily - I need to run similar sessions myself but had nothing prepared. Her resources are excellent so this will save me a lot of time and really benefit my students. 

Speaking of A level, did you see the recent new resources on Edexcel Emporium? They have shared A Level Maths Exam-Style Topic Tests for Statistics and Mechanics.  These questions are new and have been reviewed by the examining team - they are not just collections of old questions. They have also published a set of Mock Papers for AS Further Maths - this was very much needed. 

2. Constructions Booklet

Thank you to Tom Riley for sharing his workbook for constructions and loci. 

Tom has also provided some words of wisdom on teaching this topic (see his Bluesky thread for more detail):

1. Start with lots of practice of just drawing circles with compasses.
2. Go into lots of depth on each construction before moving on so that students become familiar with the language early (e.g. shading, showing points, use of scales).
3. Interleave where possible (e.g in the booklet you see circles then perpendicular bisectors then circles with perpendicular bisectors).
4. Include tasks where students have to identify which construction to use (extract below).
5. Use a visualiser.

3. Literacy and Oracy

Oracy is a big focus for a lot of schools at the moment. At my school we have done loads of CPD on it for the last three years (!) but it continues to be something we need to develop across the school. 

‪MrLevMaths‬ helpfully shared a slide from discussions he'd had in department CPD about the link between student oracy, mathematical communication and understanding. How do you ensure students know which expression you mean when you are explaining? How do you explicitly teach them to talk about their maths?

 

Teachers all say these things differently. For C above, would you say the words "lots of" "multiply" "all over"? This is a really interesting thing to cover in department CPD. 

You might be interested in the 'Maths Pronunciation Project' video I made a few years ago. Even the way we say x⁴ differs between teachers.

4. Transum

I spotted a tweet from @Transum about their interactive circles parts vocabulary tool. It might help students appreciate the number of different shapes a sector can have, and prompt questions about major/minor and whether a segment can be a semicircle. 

Transum is full of lovely tasks and tools. For example check out Tim Honeywill's Indices Challenge. 

Transum has also added three more panels to their popular Refreshing Revision tool which can be customised by the teacher.

5. Congruency

@hartmaths shared some congruency questions that he used with his Year 11s. There's lots of interweaving here - these questions feature angles in parallel lines, properties of shapes and circle theorems.

Update

La Salle have said on Twitter that Mathsconf37 will be on 15th March in Sheffield. Tickets are not yet on sale but apparently they will be soon. I've prepared a workshop for this conference called 'Fun with Factorising' which I am very excited about. If you enjoy algebra, come along!

I have a vacancy at my lovely school - we're looking for a maths teacher to join us in September. We're a mixed comprehensive school in South London/Surrey. We have great behaviour and attitudes, happy students and excellent maths results (our first two maths P8s were 1.26 and 1.22. 50% of our students got a Grade 7+ at GCSE last year, and 94% got 4+). My team are friendly and brilliant and it's a real pleasure to work with them. We are particularly in need of someone who can teach mechanics at A level, and we can offer a timetable that is majority A level teaching if desired. But if you're considering applying and you're not an A level teacher, please do go ahead and apply as we can be flexible on this. The closing date is Monday 27th January so apply quickly, or get in touch this weekend if you have questions. We will interview over the next couple of weeks. More information here. 

Finally, don't forget to check out Dr Austin's new resources - they cover circles, ratio, averages and mechanics. I particularly like her Area and Perimeter of Sectors with Pythagoras Practice Grid.

5 Maths Gems #184

Happy New Year and welcome to my 184^th 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 loved her recent post about graph sketches. 

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

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.

Vacancy

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!

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.

Thank you for reading, and all the best for the start of the Spring term.

Christmas Gifts for Maths Teachers

I've been browsing the internet for maths related stocking fillers. I thought it might be helpful to share what I've found, to save time for anyone else looking for mathsy gifts. 

Posters and Prints

There are some lovely mathematical posters on Etsy but most have to be downloaded digitally. A teacher looking for classroom or corridor displays might pay to download posters then print them at school. But if you're giving them as gifts then you might want a more professional finish in which case perhaps the files could be uploaded to somewhere like Photobox for printing. Some of these posters are nice enough that they could even be framed and put up at home. There are dozens of examples - here's a selection:

Famous Mathematicians Posters from McMurrayCreative on Etsy

Fibonacci Prints (can be delivered framed) from WallBuddy on Etsy

Math Bulletin Board from MapleandHen on Etsy

Funny Maths Class Posters from GardenistaShop on Etsy

Mathematician Quotes from TeachBird on Etsy

Famous Mathematician Posters from NumberOneResources on Etsy

Maths Pun Posters from BanddersArt on Etsy 

Notebooks and Pads

I love notebooks! There are plenty of mathematical notebooks to choose from and I think they make a lovely gift.

Maths Hardcover Notebook from Atoms to Astronauts

Personalised Notebook from Not On The High Street

Purr-pendicular Notepad from flamingimp on Etsy

Personalised Maths Notebook from GooseandMoosePrints on Etsy

Personalised Maths Notebook from Zazzle

Maths teacher notepad from Zazzle

Maths teacher post-its from Zazzle

Coasters

I think a mathsy coaster makes a really nice gift for a teacher's classroom desk.

Maths Coasters from 13DaisyChains on Etsy

Slate Pi Coaster from LasersAreUs on Etsy

Squared Square Coasters from Maths Gear

Personalised Maths Coaster from KelhamTreaures on Etsy

Gift Coasters from Onix9Creation on Etsy

There are also some really cute coasters and other gifts on chemisttree.com but be warned - they ship from the US so the shopping cost is more than the cost of the coasters.

Stickers and Badges

Stickers and badges make nice stocking fillers for maths teachers. Here are a few examples.

Maths Pun Stickers from ZNLabels in Etsy

Sheet of vinyl stickers from DestinationVinylLtd on Etsy

Custom Maths Stickers from School Stickers

Maths Reward Stickers from Maths Gear

Maths Badges from MegaShedArts on Etsy

Maths Pins from MayzeeWork on Etsy

Miscellaneous

There are loads more gifts I could have included in this post - endless mugs, t shirts and brilliant books for example - but I need to keep it to a manageable length! So here are just a few gift ideas that you might not have seen before.

Pi Jigsaw Puzzle from Amazon
(read the review about how it was used on Pi Day!)

Jewellery and Cufflinks from Maths Gear

The Proof is in the Pudding Bowls from Present Indicative

Maths Pencils from Not On The High Street

Maths Socks from Ties Planet

Maths Pencil Case from 13DaisyChains on Etsy

Pi Hoodie from CorporateTogs on Etsy

Pythagoras Cookie Cutter from Bakerlogy on Etsy

A Compendium of Mathematical Methods by Jo Morgan :)

If you're shopping for a maths lover then check out Maths Gear and Present Indicative - both websites are packed full of excellent maths gifts.

Note that I haven't checked the quality of any of the gifts listed in this post so please don't blame me if they turn out to be rubbish (apart from my book! That is quite good...). Also, please don't think I have taken money to promote any of these items - everything featured here is just stuff I've randomly found.

Maths teachers - if you like what you see here, send this post to your loved ones!