Answer the questions about truncation to reveal the punchline to a cheesy joke. These are popular in class in my experience.

The usual: answer the questions to reveal the punchline to the joke. Can be used in starters, plenaries, main tasks and homeworks!

Answer the questions and reveal the gag; I rather like this joke (I saw it on social media and it’s clean). There are “given that…” questions too to create discussion.

Find the invariant points, reveal the punchline to a cheesy joke… Useful for starters, plenaries and main tasks in my experience but use (or don’t use) however you like.

Answer the questions (including algebraic ones) to reveal the punchline. Ideal for starters, plenaries or a main activity and the students seem to enjoy them.

This is probably more aimed at Further Maths Level 2 Certificate or early A Level but could be a challenge task for GCSE students too. It’s the usual “answer the questions and reveal the punchline”.

Fill in the blanks to reveal the punchline to the cheesy joke. These seem popular with students and can be used as a main task, starter or plenary but you have a brain and don’t need me to tell you how to structure your lessons!

The usual thing: answer the questions, reveal the cheesy joke. I use these as starters, plenaries and main tasks; you can use them (or not as the case may be) however you like… but students do seem to like them (if the volume of groans at the jokes is anything to go by).

Some equations and inequalities to solve, using sketches where possible, to reveal the cheesy joke. I will be using this as a starter.

Differentiate the expressions to reveal the punchline to a cheesy joke. I will probably use this as a starter but you can use it however you like…

The usual: complete the questions correctly to reveal the punchline to a joke. This involves chain rule, product rule and quotient rule.

Integrate the expressions, reveal the punchline… This includes “reverse chain rule”, one integration by parts and where the differential of the denominator is the numerator. A useful starter?

Convert the trigonometric expressions to the appropriate double angle formula to reveal the anagram of a cheesy joke. I would use this as a starter but obviously use it (if at all) how you wish.

I say polynomials but actually I could only really use cubics, but there you go. Answer the questions (given one real root) and reveal the hilarious joke… I actually quite like this one (so did my form group).

Find the roots as complex numbers and reveal the punchline to a cheesy joke. Something different to ploughing through text book exercises…

Simplify the complex numbers (adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) to reveal the “hilarious” punchline. Good for something different…?

Differentiate the algebraic expressions to find the punchline to a cheesy joke; something different from going through exercises in the book!

Another cheesy joke revealed upon differentiating some expressions using the product rule. A nice change from going through exercises in the text book.

Trying to expand my A Level codebreaker portfolio and this is next on the rank; differentiate using the chain rule to find the punchline to a cheesy joke. It’s something different to a text book exercise anyway…

These defuse the bomb tasks have all been written since the New Year and have been successful in online lessons as well as in class. They cover topics such as rounding, truncation, sequences, sets and Venn diagrams, quadratics, compound measures, tree diagrams and more. They are all available for free individually.