Four matchings - two relatively easy and two more challenging. These are designed to be used as starters or plenaries and will hopefully give students the confidence to tackle tougher problems than they usually do.

Four spiders on sets and two on shading Venn diagrams. Hopefully these will create a little discussion and make students think. A couple of the diagrams now improved.

Six matching activities: 1 mode, 1 median, 1 mean, 1 mixture (all include frequency tables), 2 grouped data. These are designed to be starters or plenaries but could be used as a whole lesson activity if you wish.

Six matchings involving set notation and shading Venn diagrams. Hopefully these will encourage discussion in the classroom and they are designed as starters or plenaries where students, since most of the answers are there, are encouraged to try harder problems than they might normally do.

This idea is from Craig Barton and is an excellent one (check them out his at website); essentially it is four questions based on the same information. There are four here which use ratio, Pythagoras, time, fractions, probability, percentages and measures as well as other topics. This really should create discussion and a deeper understanding of the topics covered on top of ensuring that students actually read the question. I hope these are worthy! I will be using these as starters or plenaries.

This idea is from Craig Barton and is an excellent one (check them out his at website); essentially it is four questions based on the same information. There are four here which use volume, ratio, Pythagoras, bearings, measures, area and perimeter, speed, percentages and bounds as well as other topics. This really should create discussion and a deeper understanding of the topics covered on top of ensuring that students actually read the question. I hope these are worthy! I will be using these as starters or plenaries.

This is designed to get students thinking rather than just blindly following a mathematical recipe. There a four sets of 4 problems which all have the same answer (given in the centre of the screen). Each question has a blank for the students to fill in and sometimes there is more than one answer for the blank. This particular one covers probability, percentages, fractions, ratio, angles, equations, gradient, indices and other topics. I will be using these as starters to get students thinking.

This idea is from Craig Barton and is an excellent one (check them out his at website); essentially it is four questions based on the same information. There are four here which use average, area, quadratics, cubics, speed, sequences, angles and time as well as other topics. This really should create discussion and a deeper understanding of the topics covered on top of ensuring that students actually read the question. I hope these are worthy! I will be using these as starters or plenaries.

I was asked to teach a friend’s child how to add and subtract fractions from the basics up to adding fractions with similar denominators. This is what I came up with, using colouring in rectangles to help. I hope it’s useful.

This is designed to get students thinking rather than just blindly following a mathematical recipe. There a four sets of 4 problems which all have the same answer (given in the centre of the screen). Each question has a blank for the students to fill in and sometimes there is more than one answer for the blank. This particular one covers fractions, decimals, percentages, sequences, probability, expressions (algebra), quadratics, standard form, indices and other topics. I will be using these as starters to get students thinking.

This is designed to get students thinking rather than just blindly following a mathematical recipe. There a four sets of 4 problems which all have the same answer (given in the centre of the screen). Each question has a blank for the students to fill in and sometimes there is more than one answer for the blank. This particular one covers probability,fractions, ratio, angles in polygons, solving equations, sequences, area and other topics. I will be using these as starters to get students thinking. One error corrected in the answers! (I need to read the question.)

Six questions with ten possible answers - students can self-mark these (if their answer is not an option they need to check their working). This involves 3D Pythagoras and trigonometry with a cuboid, a triangular prism and a square based pyramid. I would use this as a starter or plenary.

This idea is from Craig Barton and is an excellent one (check them out his at website); essentially it is four questions based on the same information. There are four here which use fractions, percentages, probability, ratio, volume, money, upper and lower bounds, speed, standard form as well as other topics. This really should create discussion and a deeper understanding of the topics covered on top of ensuring that students actually read the question. I hope these are worthy! I will be using these as starters or plenaries.

Six questions with ten possible answers so students can self-mark these questions (if their answer is not an option they need to check what they did). This involves facts about 2D and 3D shapes including edges, vertices, number of sides etc. I would use this as starter or plenary.

Three “Crack The Safe” worksheets: the first tackling “one a line, around a point etc”; the second tackling “parallel lines”: the third tackling “angles in polygons”. These are designed to be used as starters or plenaries and allow students to self-mark as the answers are on the sheet (along with some values that are not answers) - if their answer isn’t on the list of possible answers they need to check their working.

More cheesy jokes for students to discover using their mathematical skills; these are a nice plenary, starter or main activity offering something different from exercises from books. The jokes, whilst terrible, only make them keener to discover the punchline oddly.

The usual cheesy joke; these offer an increasing challenge as students work through them and seem popular (certainly in my classes). Some are partially factorised which makes the students think.

Relatively new to the GCSE/IGCSE syllabus and I didn’t have much stuff so I wrote some. The first one takes us through different types of question (including a volume one or two) plus a codebreaker with a joke that one of my students made up (not as bad as it possibly sounds).

The world’s increasing population means that Santa has to run a rotation system for his reindeer to stop them getting over tired. This means six question and eight answers for students to solve so that Santa can select his reindeer. These offer a self-checking, festive feel to maths lessons (my Year 11 liked them anyway). Topics include Inequalities, differentiation, functions (substitution, inverse and composite), simplifying indices, solving quadratics (both factorising and non-factorising), simultaneous equations, rearranging formulae and others. We were told to teach until the holidays (fair enough) so I did this…

Twenty four differentiation questions where students are asked to find the gradient of a curve at a given point, order the words associated with each answer in order to form a festive joke. The joke is particularly cheesy; I apologise…