Resourceaholic: 5 Maths Gems #173

Welcome to my 173^rd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Graphics
@boss_maths has started to share a series of editable graphics for use in maths teaching. These lovely visual aids can be adapted and used as you see fit. Here's an example from Sudeep's pressure PowerPoint.

Check out Sudeep's hashtag #WednesdayVisual for more in this series.

2. Maths Advance

I spotted some challenging questions from Maths Advance on TES and this led me to the website mathsadvance.co.uk. This website is packed full of challenge questions for loads of GCSE topics. It's well worth a look. To access the solutions you'll need to subscribe.

3. Dr Austin
@draustinmaths has continued to produce new resources over the holidays, including tasks for negative numbers, decimals and factors and multiples. Thanks Amanda! I'll add these to my resource libraries.

4. MathsPad

MathsPad have continued to publish more of their high quality curriculum booklets, the most recent additions being Year 10 Higher Chapters on Primes, Bounds & Calculator Methods and Formulae, Simultaneous Equations & Sequences, and a Year 10 Foundation Chapter on Indices and Standard Form. These are all available to subscribers - this is the subscription I recommend the most to maths teachers! I use MathsPad resources literally every day... Below you can see some examples of tasks from the new booklets.

5. Escape Room

@emmaemma53 made a Team Challenge for her Trust-wide maths enrichment competition, which had an “Escape Room” theme. You can find the resources she used here. Thanks for sharing Emma!

Marvellous Maths 3

The biggest event for maths teachers this year is of course Marvellous Maths 3 - a full day of top quality maths CPD, presented by Craig Barton and myself. We now have three confirmed venues. The first course is on 18th October and it takes place at my lovely school in Sutton, South London (those of you who attended Marvellous Maths 1 in 2019 will remember the excellent lunch!). Then on 19th October we'll be at the very fancy Worcester Racecourse which is brilliantly located right in the middle of Worcester - it's near the station plus there's plenty of parking. On 20th October we'll be in Craig's hometown of Bolton at the Science and Technology Centre.

For information and booking see mathscpd.weebly.com. We're excited to welcome our fabulous sponsors on board - AQA and OUP. It's shaping up to be a really exciting event, not to be missed. We've already sold lots of tickets but don't worry - we do have space on all three courses (we know most people will be putting in CPD requests at school in September). I recommend getting the ball rolling as soon as possible though - when we ran Marvellous Maths 1 in 2019 it did sell out quickly. For our Early Bird ticket, with 20% discount, you'll need to book by 8th September. Why not bring the whole department along?

Resource Libraries
If you're new to teaching then you might not know about my resource libraries which contain listings of resources for Key Stages 3 to 5, organised by topic. I use these libraries every day when planning lessons as they provide a quick way to browse quality free resources. The easiest way to access my resource libraries when you're planning lessons is using the menu across the top of my blog.

I try to keep my Key Stage 3 and 4 libraries updated on an ongoing basis, and this year (now I'm teaching A level again, after a five year break), I will start to sort out the broken links in my Key Stage 5 libraries. I'll also add any great new resources that I discover.

Update

I know lots of you will have been having a break from thinking about teaching over summer. Here are some things you may have missed, for when you're ready to get back into school mode:

Ofsted published Coordinating mathematical success: the mathematics subject report in July. If you're teaching maths in England then you really should read this. If you find the format annoying, @mrshawthorne7 shared a helpful PDF version. And @mrmarchayes produced an excellent written and visual summary at marcrhayes.com.
MEI announced the return of their annual competition Ritangle which starts on 2nd October. This is aimed at A level mathematicians.
A level maths legend @TLMaths has been busy extending his video collection to cover lessons on GCSE topics.
I blogged about Year 7 Assessments and I shared a Twitter thread on Sixth Form Taster Day Activities.
In preparation for the possible demise of Twitter, which was once the very best place for sharing teaching ideas, a lot of teachers have set up accounts on Threads. You can find me there as @mathsjem, but I'll still mainly be posting on Twitter until it totally implodes.

If you want to start preparing for September, you might find these resources helpful:

My Year 7 Maths Activities post which features ideas for first lessons with Year 7
My Displays page which contains loads of fantastic maths displays for corridors and classrooms

Over the last few days I've been planning my first department meeting of the year, and my first A level lessons. I've also started to prepare some CPD for my team on the new model of Casio. For this I'll be using @cclay8's cards.

Apart from that, I've been having a lovely relaxing summer so far. I enjoyed drinks with my wonderful maths department on the last day of term...

I met up with Paul, Megan and David to say goodbye to the absolute legend Paul Rodrigo - he's off to teach maths in Sweden.

And I even managed to brush up on my history of maths whilst lounging by the pool in Gran Canaria! Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh is absolutely brilliant - I can't recommend it enough.