Today’s resource can be tricky it combines the skills of expanding out brackets and simplifying with area and perimeter. Each question on this resource could be used as a separate activity or the sheet could be used for homework. It really tests the understanding of expressions and area and perimeter with some reasoning style questions included. There is a lot of problem solving involved in this, my favourite being question 4 which took a while to put together as well as answer. This could easily be extended as you will see at the end of the resource to include fractions, percentages, averages and spread. You could even go further and ask students to substitute a value for x into the expressions and arrange the shapes via order of size (but if you do this please note this resource was designed for only expressions and so the shapes were not drawn to scale) I really hope you enjoy, please give me feedback (especially if you come across any mistakes). This will be available on TES until Monday 13th August.

One of my favourite films is called “Pay It Forward” (http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0223897/). This resource is based on the film. There is a young boy who decides to make the world a better place, he completes three good deeds to three different people, and when these people want to thank him he asks them to complete three good deeds to three people and pay it forward. Therefore this resource is designed on that concept except that I have put in a time limit, the deeds are all completed in one day. From that the pupils could work out a general rule and then calculate the number of days it takes a set amount of people to have completed a good deed, or, the numbers of people after a certain amount of days. This incorporates geometric sequences.

This resource is another one I will use in my year 7 lessons, and is differentiated for the lesson. It is based on highest common factor.

This resource is a differentiation task on prime factors decomposition.

Tuesday’s resource brings together area, perimeter, fractions, decimals and percentages. From this students can practise calculations with decimals when calculating area and perimeter. Reasoning is also present when students are asked to order the shapes in order for size of their perimeter and area before even completing calculations. Students are then asked to complete number sentences finding fractions and percentages of area and perimeter. This resource will be available for free until 13th August from TES

Only two weeks left to go until the end of the summer and the end of these resources. This weeks resources start off where last weeks ended, a crossover problem with probability and expressions. Today’s resource looks at simplifying, expanding and factorising algebraic expressions and combining it with number and probability. A good resource that can be used with a year 7/8 class and can be adapted to add challenge. This will be available for free until Friday 25th August on TES.

The final of this week’s installment of resources is crossover with ratio, area and perimeter. Not only will the students be practising calculating perimeter and area it also gets them thinking about scale factors and what happens to the area (a skill they will not come across until maybe year 9). Lengths are a mixture in fractional and decimal form so they are practicing skills of multiplication and division also.

This week’s first Crossover Resource looks at formulae and data analysis, where students are given data, formula and have to answer questions after inputting the data into the formulae. They then have to decide which is the best graph for them to choose to best display the data. This could be adapted to add in some challenge or more depth my exploring the ways that data could have been collected, why do different people have different journeys and what factors could affect the journey to work. More to come!

To put a large or small number in standard form, a resource in the style of a recipe. There are more resources for this, just email info@mentor4maths.co.uk and I will email them over to you. Any feedback is welcome.

A lesson designed to consolidate knowledge on calculating volume. I have used this with a class of year 10s and they were all engaged. I played a short video, which could be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwc6QklQGFw and designed this sheet for the pupils to work through. At the beginning they have to predict whether the bowling balls will float. Then after working through the activity I played the remainder of the video showing, which bowling balls did float.