Given the information on the bands A-ha, Depeche Mode, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Madness, can you argue who the best/most successful band of the 1980s was? This is designed to get students to think about relevant calculations to back up their argument. I have calculated some answers but won't have covered everything.

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.

Another set of four "spiders" to encourage discussion regarding shapes. It starts with naming polygons, moves on to triangles, quarilaterals and finally 3D shapes.

Surds practice from basic simplifying to expanding brackets to rationalising denominators. This encourages workings and the students to work backwards (what's the question given this answer?) so should also encourage discussion in class.

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.

There are 8 slides involving 5 questions on each. Answers are given for each question but students must decide whether those answers are correct. There are also “answer slides” but no explanation intentionally because this should invite discussion. The slides move through Pythagoras, trigonometry in right-angled triangles, whether the triangle is right-angled or not, exact trigonometric values, trigonometry in non-right-angled triangles including some worded problems. As I said before, the whole point of these is to create discussion points in class. Hyperlinks now work; sorry for neglecting this initially!

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.

Given one coordinate, can students come up with a second coordinate so that the line between the two meets certain criteria? This is an activity designed to create discussion, covering gradient and equations of lines. Extension should be pretty easy, allowing students to generate equations of lines etc. I have left a slide template so that you can create your own if you wish.

There are six slides with a percentage and fraction sales-related question question. This involves calculating sale prices, working out which sale would offer the best price and finding the original price given the sale price. This is designed to create discussion in class.

This is a presentation involving six real recipes (linked on each slide) and their ingredients which students have to work with to make the number of each required. This is designed to create a bit of discussion and the questions get more challenging as you work through them.

There are four trees where students can work from bottom to top, choosing an appropriately challenging start point if they wish. This is “introduction to algebra” stuff, I will do expanding and factorising on a separate file but these could offer nice starters or plenaries. It contains adding/subtracting as well as multiplying variables and collecting like terms.

Find the appropriate equivalent fraction and find the punchline to Tim Vine’s joke; designed as a bit more practice for some of my Year 7 and 8 classes, but could be useful for others. I have uploaded PDF versions so those who don’t have Equation Editor can see them; no need to thank me…

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

Six trees taking students through simplifying, fractions of an amount, add/subtracting, multiplying/dividing, mixed numbers. Four questions on each getting progressively harder so students can choose the level they start (and finish). Good for starters or plenaries(?).

This not only lists all the topics on the IGCSE maths syllabus but also gives an example of what they all are so you don’t get the continual question “what does this topic mean?”. I put a RAG analysis against each too so that students can focus revision to where it’s required. A few topics added including expanding 3 brackets, transforming functions, an extra indices example, shading regions (I originally left this off by mistake) and adding/subtracting algebraic fractions. I have just added some more examples of transformations and constructions plus summing arithmetic sequences and recurring decimals. Also includes Sparx activity codes (you can delete if you don’t want those). There are now answers (which I have done quite quickly so hopefully not too many errors!).

This is an attempt to relate algebraic questions that children struggle with to worded questions they can all do. It is designed to start you off, building up from 'I think of a number' to a full blown linear equation.

Four “Show that…” questions involving inequalities; this is more about the method and workings than getting the final answer. This should involve good mathematical discussions.

Four questions, ten possible answers. Students seem to like these and can just get on with them as answers appear on the sheet. This only involves the cosine rule.

The usual joke found by converting times from 12 hour to 24 hour clock and vice versa. Also includes some "worded" times. Designed for starter, plenary, discussion, homework.

Using some (clean!) clips from Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail and Life of Brian (5 clips in total) there are some maths questions. Each clip (which has a hyperlink as the embed feature in Powerpoint is messing about) has 3 questions. It was a challenge given to me on Twitter! Should be fun though, and I will have to prevent myself from giggling in the corner. There are Smart Notebook version but the file size exceeds the limit apparently!