5 Maths Gems #200

Welcome to my 200^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. MathsPad
MathsPad'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, they can be found at the top right of their curriculum pages.

MathsPad has also shared two packs of 'Grade 9 Club' Question Packs: Pack A and Pack B. These include worked solutions for each question. 

They have also published a series of Foundation One Markers containing non-calculator one mark questions for GCSE Foundation on a mixture of topics. The skills recur from one sheet to the next, so pupils get repeated practice of each skill.

There's other new resources too, including more in the Building Blocks range (aimed at secondary school students who need support with the basics), more Higher GCSE revision packs, and an inverse functions matching activity. We love MathsPad at my school - it's well worth the subscription.

2. X Why
Andy of m4th5.co.uk has shared a graphing tool for classroom use: X Why. It can be used to see graph transformations happen, draw instant inverses, put your own labels on curves and points, see integrals and areas under curves, draw tangents and normals and much more. Graphs can be exported to worksheets and presentations, and axes are auto-scaled for degrees and radians.

3. NCETM Professional Development Materials

The final set of the NCETM's Key Stage 4 Professional Development Materials is now available, completing the full suite of Secondary Mastery Professional Development Materials for both KS3 and KS4. This set covers Key Stage 4 Geometry including transformations, circle theorems, trigonometry and 3D shapes. As with the other sets, these materials contain lots of fantastic ideas for getting your students thinking. For example, there's a task where students are asked to identify which of the diagrams correctly show the alternate segment theorem.

I also like what they've done here with bearings diagrams in non-standard orientations...

... and I like relating vectors to throwing a ball.

4. A level 
In my last lesson with Year 12 this Friday I will be teaching Year 2 Binomial Expansion with Partial Fractions - I never understand how anyone manages to fit the entire A level curriculum into such limited time! I'm perpetually running behind with my A level classes. But if you have a spare lesson with Year 12 at the end of term, they might enjoy this murder mystery revision task from Danielle @PixiMaths. You can download it here.

Another A Level resource that caught my eye recently was a set of statistics tasks posted by MrLevMaths. Read his blog post for more.

5. Esheets and Whiteboard Workouts
I discovered two websites that aren't new, but I've not seen them before. 

esheets.io from Richard Linnington features self marking worksheets, maths puzzles and games (including end of term maths activities) and teacher visualisation tools. I particularly like the sheep tethered to a building and sheep with a sliding ring.

Whiteboard Workouts from southportmaths.co.uk are PowerPoints that are designed for mini whiteboard questioning.

A Milestone
I started this blog whilst on maternity leave in April 2014. My first post was about a method for matrix multiplication. A lot of my earlier posts were about methods. Later I started writing more about resources. I wrote my first gems post in August 2014, when I realised that there were loads of great ideas and resources being shared on Twitter that needed to be shared more widely, so that all the maths teachers in the country (and beyond) could see them, not just the teachers using social media. Over the years I've been contacted by many teachers who tell me that they find these posts helpful, so I continue to write them. There are a number of authors and websites that have 'found fame' after they featured in my posts! 

Today I've published my 518th blog post, which is the 200th post in the Maths Gems series. I used to post gems posts every week, but it was impossible to continue posting so frequently as my daughters grew older, and my school workload increased. Now I try to write one gems post a month, but it can be difficult to find enough material since the mass exodus of maths teachers from Twitter. Back when the new GCSE was introduced in 2017, social media was packed full of teachers sharing resources and helping each other out - with another curriculum change on the horizon, maybe we will regain some of that magic once day. In the meantime, I will endeavour to continue posting once a month. If you're new to my blog then I recommend having a look at my back catalogue of gems posts. There's a lot of great stuff in them. 

Events
I had a fantastic time at the MEI Conference as always. I attended on Thursday evening for the dinner and drinks (free bar courtesy of Casio!) and all day on the Friday. I presented on methods to a lovely audience, and enjoyed trying some incredibly difficult geometry problems with Bernard Murphy. Sue Black's keynote was excellent. Shout out to Marc the tutor who sat with me and Megan Guinan after my session and showed us a fun method for factorising non-monic quadratics.

Looking ahead at events that are coming up...

• On the last two days of the summer term my headteacher has kindly given me permission to attend the Future of Maths Education event which is being held by XTX Markets. This is an invite-only event and I'm delighted to be on the guest list. I believe I'm the only teacher attending - in fact I have to go there directly after running a Year 7 trip so I'm expecting to be thoroughly exhausted... but I am really looking forward to it. 
• Mathsconf41 has been announced - it's taking place in Liverpool on 5th September. A conference at the very start of the academic year is a fantastic idea - the perfect timing to inspire and motivate. I'm not sure yet whether I'll attend - as both a mum of teenagers and Head of Department I have a feeling I'll have a million things to do that weekend. But I hate to miss a mathsconf so I will have to have a think about this one!
• BCME 10 is a big deal in the world of maths education, and it takes place in Nottingham on October 23rd and 24th. I loved the last BCME in 2018. To cut the cost for teachers, bursaries and early bird rates are available but you have to act now to take advantage of these opportunities (the deadline for bursaries is this week! And the early bird rate is valid until the end of July). Information about bursaries is here. I would apply for one myself but my school isn't in an area of high deprivation so I don't qualify. I really encourage teachers who meet the criteria to apply for a bursary to help cover the cost - it's so important that teachers attend this conference.

Update

What an insanely busy time at school! Our classrooms were sweltering when it was 37 degrees and we had a few early closures in response to parent concerns about students travelling home in the extreme weather. We also had new staff induction and Sports Day last week (Sports Day picture of my maths team below - minus four members who were busy elsewhere!). Plus I've been hosting lots of visitors in my department who come to see my curriculum in action and find out how we do things. This week is Open Evening and Year 10 are on work experience, and then the following week there are a whole load of trips to run. As I said in my post Tasks for the Summer Term, this time of year is always surprisingly busy! And the delay of SATs results will have me working in the summer holidays (even more so than usual) because I use them for Year 7 groupings.

Have a great week! Thanks for reading.

5 Maths Gems #198

Welcome to my 198^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. GCSE Question Distribution

Thanks 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 much more granular analysis, for all exam boards and including IGCSE. 

I teach AQA at GCSE and when I teach circle theorems I always say 'alternate segment theorem seems to come up a lot in exams' - this was just a hunch, but now I know for sure - it does indeed come up a lot! Of course just because something has appeared in exams a lot in the past, it doesn't mean it will continue to do so (in fact, the opposite could be true - perhaps this year's GCSE exams will contain a lot of topics that haven't been tested in a while) so this data can't be used to make predictions. It's still interesting though. Thank you to Jamie for sharing it. 

Each skill includes a link to a randomly generated example question. Schools subscribed to Dr Frost can generate worksheets from these which can be printed or set as online tasks.

2. E2E Revision Sheets

@ThtPedagogyGeek has created a nice set of resources called E2E (Example to Exam) Revision Sheets. The idea is that you model the worked example - students copy it down and take notes, then complete the three questions. These are designed for GCSE revision.

3. Diagram Creator 

There are numerous online tools to create diagrams but I often find them unintuitive or overly complex, or they require a login. Thank you to @TickTockMaths for sharing a Geometry Tool designed for creating simple diagrams quickly. He made it so he could insert diagrams into lessons created with his Slide Creator (see Gems 197).

4. Corbett Maths Key Stage 1
Key Stage 1 teachers will be pleased to see that John Corbett has extended his popular 5-a-day range to Key Stage 1. He has made the first level (Ruby) with Emerald and Diamond to follow. 

I know that secondary teachers sometimes find these primary resources helpful too (I'm thinking of our Entry Level classes). 

5. A Level Resources

We had a difficult logs and integration question in our Year 13 mock this year that even our strongest mathematicians struggled with, so I'm pleased to see this lovely little task from ‪@mrlevmaths.bsky.social‬ for practising this specific skill.

Also thanks to ‪@karenshancock.bsky.social‬ for a resource on 'Power Equations' which is useful for Year 12 and also Year 11 L2 Further Maths students. 

Other resources on Karen's website that might be helpful for both Year 12 and L2 Certificate in Further Maths include Factorising with Surds and Graphical Solutions. Thank you Karen!

Also thanks to ‪@adamsfax.bsky.social‬ for his 'Edexcel formula sheet in a page'. We'll print these in September for all A level students to keep in the front of their book.

Big Mathematical Ideas

Colin Foster (one of the wisest men in maths education) has launched a new website: bigmathematicalideas.org. He has written a chapter on each of the five big mathematical ideas.

 

I believe this should be compulsory reading for every trainee teacher. No matter how good you are at maths when you train to be a teacher, the thing that everyone needs to develop is their pedagogical subject knowledge (not just how to do the maths, but how to explain the maths). But it's not just for trainees. I've been teaching for a long time now and I think my subject knowledge is pretty strong, but within a few minutes of reading this website I was thinking deeply about things that I haven't thought deeply about before (the big multipliers table in Section 1.5.2 had me wondering why I'd never shared this with students).

Reading this website will probably be my summer holiday project, or perhaps something I do in my gained time this term. I will use it to write next year's professional development sessions for my department.

 

Update

The first half of the summer term is very intense if you teach a lot of exam classes! I know that in some schools Year 11s have already started study leave, but I still have three weeks of lessons left with Year 11. I'm still doing topic-based revision (for example, next week we're revising surds and indices) and mixed revision (often using my revision mats). I always find that my students make masses of progress in our summer term revision lessons so I'm glad my time with them isn't cut short. If you're looking for good revision resources for Year 11, remember my GCSE Revision page has loads of hand-picked recommendations, and Adam Creen's annual 'Best Guess GCSE Dropbox' has been updated with the latest practice papers.  

I had a fantastic to response my last blog post (#mathsconf40) and to my recent conference presentation about Key Stage 3. I received dozens of emails from teachers asking for support on curriculum and assessments, including lots who said they find my gems posts helpful. Since most social media posts are now met with tumbleweed (a few likes and shares, but rarely a response), I often wonder if there's any point blogging for maths teachers these days - it's hard to tell whether anyone is listening. But after the flurry of lovely emails my enthusiasm for writing has returned, so thank you to everyone who got in touch. 💗

No doubt you saw that new research on setting in maths was published by the EEF. There are Year 7s in my school who struggle to add single digit numbers, or to multiply integers by ten, and others who find it easy to solve complex algebraic and geometric problems. Teaching these children in the same class doesn't make any sense to me, and I feel it would particularly let down the students who struggle the most and would benefit from being in a smaller group. Maths teachers are sometimes made to feel like they're evil or lazy for teaching in sets when they are actually trying to do the right thing for the students who need the most support. The narrative that schools often assign their 'worst' teachers to teach the lowest attainers is insulting nonsense. Most Heads of Maths prioritise the students who find maths difficult, and assign absolute superstars to teach them.

Here's a round up of some recent developments, in case you missed anything:

• Jonny Griffiths has updated his website carom-maths.co.uk which houses a collection of forty activities bridging from A Level Mathematics to University Mathematics. This is a great set of resources for a Sixth Form maths club. 
• Maths Genie has had a big update! Set up a free account to access useful resources, like the GCSE mini tests. 
• A few teachers have been in touch to ask about the RULER resources from Ben Tanner. These popular resources used to be available on Ben's website but it no longer exists. Helpfully, Tim Stirrup shared an archived version of the website, where you can still download the booklets.
• The QAMA is back - but this time, as an online version instead of a physical calculator. QAMA requires an estimation before it will work out an answer. It's great for developing number sense. If students don't have access to devices to use the online calculator in lessons, it could instead be used by the teacher in modelling. 
• Recently I've received a fair few emails from teachers who have either used AI to create tools for teachers or have created a platform where students can use AI to support their learning. For example, on gcsemathsai.co.uk students type in any topic or question and get instant step-by-step worked explanations. It covers the full GCSE syllabus and is free, with no account needed. One thing that stood out for me on this website is the misconceptions for each topic (e.g. look at 'common mistakes' for inequalities and arc length and sector area) which might be helpful for teachers planning lessons.
• Hannah Fry is going to be on the next Celebrity Traitors (our favourite family viewing - my daughter is obsessed with it)! Cue me telling everyone who will listen about the time Hannah bought me a drink and we hung out at BCME...

I'll leave you with these new 'squareas' puzzles from Transum. These are fun and come in multiple levels of difficulty. 

Thanks for reading!

5 Maths Gems #195

Welcome to my 195^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Maths Rocket

gcsemathsrocket.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. There's everything from getting the direction of arrows right to simple vector routes to a gradual introduction of midpoints. There are lots of questions on each individual skill (extracts are shown below) before it's all brought together at the end in full exam questions. I haven't seen this topic broken down so carefully before. 

Choose any topic and you'll find a similar approach. For example, check out the range of different question types on the Sine Rule worksheet and look at the amount of practice available in the Box Plots worksheet. I think these are great and when I get time I'll add them to my resource libraries.

In addition to the large collection of worksheets, there's a Questions Database for Edexcel GCSE Maths. It looks similar to the very user-friendly website Examq.co.uk which I featured in Gems 158, but it's slightly different in that it takes you directly to a page in an exam paper.

 

There are also slides and YouTube videos which are designed to follow an 'I do, You do' structure to ensure students don't just passively watch the videos but get plenty of practice throughout. 

2. Mr Barton Maths
Craig Barton has updated his free website mrbartonmaths.com with some new features.

Super 8s are designed for consolidation practice of a current topic or for retrieval practice of previously taught skills. It's very easy to select topics. Teachers can project the eight questions on the board in full-screen mode, or print a one page worksheet. Students can also use the tool directly on their phone.

The Exam Papers page provides step-by-step worked solutions for SATs, GCSE, AQA Level 2 Further Maths and A Level questions. Each solution clearly explains the method, and the idea is students use this page independently when revising. If they get stuck on a question when revising, looking at a full worked solution is way more helpful than looking at a mark scheme.

There's also a Games section - some of my Year 7s were enjoying these games during a snowy lunchtime last week.

And there are some great little teacher tools like equipment trackers and noise monitors. 

3. AI and GCSE Stats

Thank you to @harryzafar for sharing two blog posts about how he uses AI to make maths resources. I know lots of my readers are interested in developments in AI and how they relate to maths resourcing so I recommend checking out what Harry has been doing:

• Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Mathematics Resources
• Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Mathematics Resources: Checks for Understanding

Harry has used AI tools to create some more resources to add to his GCSE Statistics collection at mathboardwalk.com. 

4. Hannah Kettle

Hannah Kettle has been busy making her website easier to navigate. There are lots of useful GCSE Maths resources at hannahkettlemaths.co.uk.

5. I Do You Do Exam Papers

Thank you to Muhammed Balal for emailing me about this simple idea - it seems obvious but I haven't seen it done before. He has taken exam papers and associated shadow papers produced by exam boards, and compiled them into combined 'I do, you do' papers. The idea is that the teacher models a question and then the student completes a very similar question on the next page, and this continues the whole way through the exam paper. This would be a great way to practise exam technique, with the teacher modelling how to set out workings and the students getting plenty of practice throughout the lesson. Muhammed has made papers for GCSE (both AQA and Edexcel) and A level, and GCSE Statistics. He has shared them at mathswalkthrough.co.uk.

Update

Two gems posts in quick succession! This never happens. Social Media has been very quiet over the last year so I struggle to find materials for gems posts these days. But a little flurry of activity online and in my inbox at the end of the Christmas holidays meant that I could write another Gems post only two weeks after posting Gems 194.

What this does mean is I have no new personal news to report, other than the fact it was my birthday last week, and my age is now a multiple of both three and five. Happy Birthday to me! My husband got me a mini Galton Board for my desk which I love showing to students.

My school has a maths teacher job vacancy going live imminently. Please get in touch if you're interested and want more information. We're based in South London. We need someone who can teach Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 5 (with a statistics preference at Key Stage 5). We're fully staffed with a very happy maths department, but we're increasing our staff numbers next year so we can meet the high demand for A level maths.

Did you see the news that Casio has tweaked their Classwiz calculators so they are essentially bringing back the much-missed SD button? I believe it's still labelled as the Format button, but pressing it once will automatically switch between fraction and decimal like SD used to do (and pressing shift + format will bring up the format menu). The new calculator model is the Classwiz+ - you can read more about it here.

At my school we have Year 11 mocks coming up in a couple of weeks. We've nearly finished teaching all the content of the specification and in preparation for these mock exams we will be providing our students with the 'Things to Memorise' resources that I made this time last year and shared in Gems 184.  If you didn't see this at the time, you may find it helpful. You can download these for both Higher and Foundation tier (including editable versions) here for your Year 11 students. Last year we handed them out before mocks and I was surprised to see students still clutching onto them on the morning of the actual Maths GCSE exams in May and June. 

Also, in case you haven't seen this before, it's worth knowing that @1stclassmaths has updated his GCSE Topic Appearance page. Although we can't use topic frequency to predict what will be in this summer's exams (you could say that topics that rarely come up are due an appearance, or you could say that topics that rarely come up are unlikely to come up... who knows), students always find this page fascinating so it's worth showing to your Year 11s.

5 Maths Gems #190

Welcome to my 190^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Resources Created Using AI

I 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 ChatGTP to help him make these resources but he doesn't just type in a prompt. The AI generates graphs and questions but it's Duncan who does the thinking about what the tasks should actually look like. The resources follow an "I Do, We Do, You Do" approach, intended to be delivered at pace, with live modelling leading to lots of independent practice.

Duncan's aim is to break down each topic so that lower attaining students can access high level material, and to create resources that can be used by non-specialist or inexperienced teachers.

In these resources Duncan has stripped away unnecessary complexity - things like awkward language or overcomplicated scales - and introduced key representations without context at first, so students can focus on the mathematical structure without distraction.

Check out Duncan's resources at aimaths.weebly.com.

2. Dr Austin's Key Stage 3 Revision
I really like these new Key Stage 3 revision resources from Dr Austin. The worked examples at the top means they'll work well if you're setting cover for absent teachers, as well as for revision.

3. Best Guess GCSE Papers
Many thanks to everyone who has created and shared Paper 2 resources for next week's GCSE exam. These include @1stClassMaths, @MathsTeacherHub, @Mr_D_Does_Maths, @hkettlemaths, @ThtPedagogyGeek, @CorbettMaths, @OnMaths, @ThirdSpaceTweet, @MattTheApp, @GCSEMathsTutor, @Just_Maths, @AddvanceMaths, @BennettMaths and @DrFrostResource and more (apologies to those I've missed - there's been so many to keep track of!).

1stclassmaths.com

At my school we are fortunate that we have no GCSE exams the day before Maths Paper 2 this year and we have a couple of hours where all the Year 11 maths teachers are available, so we've invited Year 11 into school to do some predicted papers that day. We plan to use the 1st Class Maths Predicted Papers plus a revision mat that I've made containing topics that might come up in the exam the next day. If you want to borrow this revision mat (note that we do AQA), feel free to download it here. Please note that I don't take any credit for writing most of the questions - I've just found questions that my students haven't seen before and arranged them in a useful resource. It's designed to be printed on A3 to ensure there's some space for workings. I've also made similar A level revision mat (we do Edexcel at A level) for our pre-exam warm up next week that you're welcome to borrow if you want.

4. GCSE Statistics

Since I started teaching GCSE Statistics as an option block course I've realised that there's a huge gap in the market for resources for this qualification. There are plenty of resources available for GCSE Maths, A Level and AQA's L2 Certificate in Further Maths, but high quality resources for GCSE Statistics are seriously lacking.

However I'm delighted to see resources for GCSE Statistics are starting to appear. This summer I hope to add a GCSE Statistics section to my resource libraries so I can signpost teachers to tasks for each topic. If you've produced GCSE Statistics resources that you're sharing for free, do get in touch so I can include the links in this new resource library.

In case you haven't seen it, statsgcse.com is a new website from OnMaths which has practice papers that students can complete online.

In my last post I mentioned @harryzafar's new website mathboardwalk.com. This collection of resources continues to grow, for example the latest addition is a resource for teaching Normal Distribution. 

@karenshancock has also shared a second GCSE Statistics revision paper at kshancock.co.uk.

5. Alpha Books
Thank you to ‪@neechmaths.bsky.social‬ and ‪@mrsevcartwright.bsky.social‬ for pointing me towards the temporary website alphaworkbooks.co.uk from Phil Thorns. Phil has published a collection of write-on workbooks which include examples, questions, hints and answers. These workbooks are great - a lot of the tasks have scaffolded hints, so I can see loads of potential uses for them, including cover work, revision and homework. 

Sadly the company Alpha Workbooks is closing down but Phil has very kindly decided to offer the workbooks to students and teachers for free. Download them quickly before the website is taken down! There are workbooks for both A level (including both statistics and mechanics) and GCSE.

Update

Exam season is underway. I have eighteen exam warm ups to prepare and run this year, and I've only done seven so far, so we still have a long way to go! It's all good fun though - I love the summer term. And there's so much to look forward to when exam season is over. I always have a great time at the MEI Conference and I can't wait to attend again this year - I will be there on the Thursday night and all day on the Friday. Book a place at mei.org.uk/conference.

I'll also be at #mathsconf38 on 21st June, presenting on some lovely surds and algebra from old textbooks. I won't be there for the pre-conference drinks on Friday night though, because I'll be in London at the TES Awards (my lovely school is up for a technology award and they are kindly letting me tag along at the awards event!).

Our friends at Casio are keen to receive feedback on their new fx-CG100 so please do let them know what you think. They have various videos to help teachers learn how to use this new model.

In other news, Craig Barton and I are thinking about running another course this October: Marvellous Maths 4. Those of you who have attended before will know how this works: it's a full day of CPD for maths teachers, and we hope to run the same event in three separate venues: South, Midlands and North. We have really enjoyed running these courses in the past and we always get great feedback. If you can offer a suitable venue in the Midlands on 21st October 2025, please get in touch (e.g. a school with capacity for 100 delegates and good transport links). 

I'll leave you with two things that made me laugh. First, from 1stClassMaths, part of a question in a practice paper with a joke that I thought only people of a certain age would notice, but has been getting lots of attention from students on TikTok:

And some Star Wars maths jokes (see this thread), which were shared on May the 4th.