Another fish joke, another set of maths questions to answer. This involves increase/decrease, finding the percentage change, reverse percentages and one repeated percentage change question. Ideal for both classroom and online tasks or a homework.

Three “spiders”: one on perimeter and two on area. Each slide contains six questions; four contain a diagram from which a formula needs to be derived and two contain a formula where students can draw their own diagram (this should lead to interesting discussions and thought processes).

Rearrange the formulae and reveal the joke (generous description in fairness). These formulae are not particularly tough to rearrange but should get across the principles of it; the subject only appears once in each case. Ideal for classroom activities (main task or starter/plenary) but I have used them for online lessons and homeworks as well.

Answer the questions, match to the letters and get a fish-related joke. These are useful in class, online or for homework; students seem to like them too despite the quality of the jokes…

Four screens of four questions involving indices where the final answer is given but parts of the questions are missing where students must fill in the blanks. Some have unique solutions/blanks and some have multiple or infinite solutions/blanks and this should lead to some great reasoning discussions and debates in class. These have been really successful in my classroom; hopefully they will be in yours as well.

Here’s another one; answer the questions and reveal a rather nice fish-related pun. This involves circumference and area of circles, including fractions of circles at the end. Ideal for classroom, online or homework activities.

Four slides each containing four questions; the answer to each question is the same (and in the middle of the slide) but parts of the question are missing. Students need to find the missing values in the question so that they can get the answer stated. Some questions have single answers, others have multiple answers (I have tried to give algebraic answers where I can) and asking students to generalise answers could be an extension. These have proven popular in class and lead to good reasoning discussions.

Use the graph showing 5 hours in the life of a shark to answer the questions and reveal a (pretty terrible) punchline to a joke. These work in class or online and essentially mark themselves as they spell out the answer so students can be reasonably independent with it.

Find the areas of some parallelograms, trapeziums, compound shapes and circles as well as working backwards to calculate a dimension to discover a really lame fish pun/joke (a generous description in this case). Ideal for class task, online task or a homework.

This gives you a calculation at the centre of each of four “spiders”; students then have to use the central calculation to fill in the blanks using their knowledge of place value. Some blanks are answers are answers to a calculation, some are questions where they are given the answer. This is designed to avoid students getting in to a rut regarding these questions and make them think about their answers.

Perform the transformations of the fish to land on the letters and spell out the punchline to a dodgy fish-related joke. This involves reflection, rotation and translation and would bee ideal for a starter/plenary, main task in class or online or as a homework.

Solve the problems involving time and find the punchline to the fish-related joke. Useful as a classroom activity, online or as a homework.

Impossible, the game show, involves asking questions and giving three possible answers: one correct, one that’s incorrect but could be correct in a different context, an impossible answer. There are twelve questions on various different topics and this is designed to encourage reasoning and discussion. Getting the answer correct is obviously important but the discussion as to why the impossible answer is correct and the other one not correct for the context might be more interesting. Topics include fraction calculations, place value, rounding, coordinates, angles and others and could be useful for Year 7.

Use one calculation and place value to answer the other questions; these sheets contain 10 answers for 8 questions so that guesses are avoided but students know that if their answers are in the table then they are likely to be heading in the right direction.

Use one of the three calculations given to find the answers to the questions and reveal a rather good joke (if you like golf). these are popular with students and ideal for either using in class, online or as a homework in my experience. This could be used at KS3 or KS2 i think.

Two fish jokes to find involving gradients: one short one with lines and one where students have to find the gradient between two points. These work in class, online or as homeworks and seem quite popular.

Three sets of questions where the answers appear on the sheet as well; this allows for the students who are understanding the topic to know that they are because their answers are on the sheet already, leaving the teacher to help those who need it. There are 3 sheets in total of increasing difficulty. I tend to use these at the start of a topic or a starter before moving on to the next stage.

Students are given a set of lines and have to solve the simultaneous equations; some need to be rearranged as well. I tend to use this as a starter or right at the beginning of a topic as the answers are there allowing students who understand get on and the teacher to help those who require help.

Use place value to find how many times larger one digit is from another and then find the difference between them. This idea was floated on Twitter by Dave Taylor (@taylora01) and full credit goes to him for the idea and I hope this does it some justice.

This was left over from ages ago and I’ve finally got around to finishing it! Name the inequalities represented on the the graph given the shaded region basically. Answers are on the sheet so that students can just get on unless they are completely stuck.