Five questions of increasing difficulty on this topic; there are ten potential answers to prevent students guessing but allows students to get on in the knowledge that their answer should be one of the options whilst the teacher can help those who need it.

Answer the questions and be rewarded with a cheesy joke! These are always popular in class or online, the cheesier the joke the better.

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…

Here are 26 codebreakers on all sorts of topics including vectors, capture-recapture, value for money, compound measures, transformations, properties of number, circle theorems, set notation amongst other topics. These have been successful in class and during online lessons and these have been uploaded individually for free over the past year or so.

These have been very successful in online lessons and remain successful now we are back in the classroom. These have been written since the New Year. Topics include averages, compound measures, bar charts, cumulative frequency, bounds, error intervals, functions, metric measures, probability and others. These are all available individually for free.

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.

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.

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.

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…?

Four of these sheets covering: capacity, mass and length plus one true or false activity involving problems with all three which should encourage discussion in class and force students to read the question carefully if nothing else. These have worked well in class and online allowing the teacher to help those who need it whilst other get on, reassured that their answers are on the sheet.

Two true or false activities: one on Venn diagrams including probability and one on shading regions of Venn diagrams with both using set notation. Students decide and discuss whether the answers given are true or false. These have worked successfully in real-life and online lessons for me.

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

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).

Three sheets on error intervals and bounds (including calculations). There are six questions but ten possible answers to choose from so students can’t guess but can check if their answer is correct.

Answer the questions, reveal the (cheesy) joke. These allow those students who are confident to get on and find their answers on the sheet whilst the teacher helps those who require it.

I felt like doing an A Level codebreaker and this seemed like a good topic to start with. Use laws of logarithms to reveal the punchline to a cheesy joke…

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!

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…