This takes students through all the skills required to solve simultaneous equations graphically (only linear graphs), by elimination and by substitution including one linear and one non-linear up to GCSE level. Work from the bottom building the skills up to the most complex style of question.

This is an activity based on the daytime quiz show “Impossible” where a question is asked and three options given: one correct, one incorrect but could be correct if the question was slightly different (partial answer), and one that is impossible (cannot be the answer). This is designed to be a discussion/reasoning activity where students find the correct answer then discuss why the other two options are impossible or incomplete. Topics include HCF, fractions, percentages, bounds, standard form, ratio, proportion, indices.

My daughter won this in a Christmas cracker (she was over the moon!) but it is full of sequences and I thought it would make a nice little activity for a class or two of mine.

The two bands are comparing notes with regards being in a band in different eras. The 1D boys work in metric, The Stones in imperial. Can you convert units between metric and imperial (and vice versa) for each band?

This leads on from 'Misleading Graphs' where the students have to draw a graph in an effort to convince a Small Business Manager to give them a loan.

This was an idea I had in a bid to get the students to explain their thinking mathematically. Error corrected!

Can you calculate what the workers in each box are doing on the mathematical building site? It's essentially function machines but where you have the answers but need to find the rules.

Celebrity cracker eating - order the fractions to see who wins each heat and the series. Increasing difficulty of common denominator.

Geometry worksheet activity: Cut out the facts on triangles and quadrilaterals and put them in to groups: Always True; Sometimes True; Never True.

Three slides with different differentiation problems. The first asks students to differentiate, find a gradient and equation of a tangent at the given point; the second asks the same but the equation of the normal at the given point; the third asks students to find the turning/stationary points. I have thrown in a bit of integration (by stealth) as well just as a challenge… and this could be used for IGCSE or A/AS Level.

This is designed to add some "real life" and to enhance to a sequences lesson. It links into the golden ratio and has a link to a YouTube video on the subject. There are invitations to calculate the golden ratio and to draw the Fibonacci spiral.

Eight matching activities that encourage discussion in class involving substituting into functions, inverses and composite functions. These would work as a starter/plenary or as a revision lesson on function notation.

This takes students through factorising quadratics, solving them and onto completing the square, including solving quadratics that won't factorise nicely. Designed as starters/plenaries/assess the learning activities.

Taking students all the way from pictograms, through bar charts, pie charts, stem-and-leaf, scatter graphs, frequency diagrams, cumulative frequency, box plots and histograms. The graphs are as large as I can make them and should be ok if copied on to A4.

Six slides each containing five questions where students need to decide if the answer given is correct and explain how they have arrived at their conclusion. Topics include whether a coordinate lies on a line given its equation, y=mx+c, equations of curves (quadratics, cubics, reciprocals), gradient, These are designed to generate discussion in class.

There are twelve transformations here, all of which have more than one solution; this asks students to find as many solutions that work, including reflections, translations, rotations and enlargements with negative scale factors. I did this with a class and offered rewards for any solutions I hadn’t listed which seemed to motivate them even more! Solutions are on a separate slide to enable printing.

Each slide contains five questions that have been answered, but not necessarily correctly. Your class need to discuss whether the answer given is correct or not and find the correct answer if not. These bring up common errors and lots of discussions. Areas covered: substitution, inverses, composite, domain & range.

I got shown this by a colleague so thought I would PowerPoint it; there are essentially a few versions of the same thing: Minimally labelled etc - for a strong set of mathematicians All angles marked The side or angle you need to find next is highlighted I will use this to introduce the addition formulae. There may well be other/better versions out there so I am sorry if I have wasted your time.

This covers sharing in a given ratio, simplifying and recipes. Each spider has challenges for discussion when seeking solutions. Designed to encourage discussion.

Six spiders on surface area and volume (3 of each) and a final "problems" spider. They are of increasing difficulty, moving from cubes and cuboids to prisms to cones, spheres and pyramids. These are designed to avoid students getting into a rut of performing a mathematical recipe by asking a mixture of finding surface area/volume to working backwards. These usually encourage discussion in class.