Clive has a homework on function notation involving domains, ranges, inverses and composite functions. He has, as per usual, made errors that your class can find, correct and explain so that Clive learns from his mistakes. These are designed to create discussion in class and this one could be used as a transitional activity between GCSE/IGCSE and A level.

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.

Indefinite integrals using the skills learned in Year 1 of the Edexcel A Level course that reveal a lame joke. These are a nice break from ploughing through a text book!

The usual “answer the questions and reveal the punchline” for some worded questions. This is designed as a task for Year 6 or 7.

Erica is having trouble with her homework (as she usually does) and requires help from your classes to correct her answers and explain the errors she’s made. This encourages discussion in class…

Five pairs of graphs; students need to calculate where intersections with each other and axes are. I have produced a PowerPoint so the graphs can be displayed, but if you want a worksheet there is one of those too. The worksheet asks for turning points on the final set of graphs.

Estimate where each fraction is given a “marker” fraction. This is designed to get students thinking about the relative sizes of fractions including multiples and “factors” of the fractions. A discussion about how they reached their answer is what I’m planning to do, but you may well have better ideas. Inspired by Professor Smudge (on Twitter: @ProfSmudge) and his blog (decimalicious.blogspot.com)

Some of the first four terms, the nth term, the term-to-term rule, the 20th term and the 50th term are missing and you have to fill in the blanks (it does what it says on the tin). Should get them thinking…

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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?

Five questions each on finding a side and finding an angle using the Sine Rule, with gaps to fill in, working forwards and backwards. This was designed as an introduction to the Sine Rule but use it (if you do at all) however you like…

I needed something for deriving formulae and came up with this. There are some that take students through the process by the hand and then four at the end that ask students to go solo (as it were).

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.

Eight questions with ten possible answers. These allow the students who understand the topic to move on with the confidence of seeing their answers on the sheet (screen for online lessons) whilst the teacher can help those who need it.

Two more rounding-based tasks; answers are on the sheet but more than the number to questions to make guessing less easy but also allow those who have the confidence to continue without the need to ask the teacher to check, allowing the teacher to help those who actually require it. The truncation sheet also contains error intervals.

Erica’s doing her data collection homework but keeps making mistakes. Can your classes help Erica learn from her mistakes by correcting then and explaining what she has done?