Those of you who have downloaded my Year 13 daily exam question resource that I posted a couple of weeks ago may be pleased to know that it has now been updated to include a question from the SAMS for every day in April.
April covers the topics below:
The updated file can be downloaded here.
I normally don’t structure my student’s revision much, however this year some of my students asked if I could provide them with guidance on what topics to revise in a given week.
Because of this I have written a revision plan, an excerpt of which is shown below.
If this will be useful for your students too download it here.
I have also done one for Further Maths. As this is more bespoke and tied to our options (Statistics and Mechanics) for AQA I haven’t uploaded it – if anyone would like it as well please get in touch.
A very quick post early this morning to share a card sort I made for damped simple harmonic motion as a fellow twitter user has requested it.
I made this about a month ago, but like everything I need to get better at sharing things in a timely fashion…
I enjoyed teaching the damped simple harmonic motion content as it is much more realistic than the idealised SHM equations. It also provided good practice of modelling, solving ODEs, using ICs, sketching graphs and interpreting graphs / solutions in context.
Each set should contain an equation, a solution, a solution plot and some conditions.
I hope it’s useful – download here.
This is going to be the first of a few posts this week, finally sharing things that I should have shared since the beginning of the year. Many of them are things that I think will be helpful for A-Level revision.
The first is the Exam Question A Day booklet I have put together for my Year 13 classes. I am really pushing the “do a bit of maths every day” mantra this year, and for some it seems to be having a positive impact 🙂
Every question in this is taken from the SAMs for AS or  A-Level Mathematics and so don’t use any of the questions contained in the practice paper sets that are kept secure by each of the exam boards, so secure mocks aren’t affected etc. I have used questions from each of the 4 boards – AQA, Edexcel, OCR, OCR (MEI) – as maths is just maths after all.
At the moment the file contains questions for February and March. The questions for April will be added by the end of this month – keep an eye out for the post about this.
The topics covered in the February and March questions are shown below:
If you want to use this with your classes please feel free to download it from here.
As this is an extremely late post for the last of the “12 Days of Christmas” series it is very brief.
I received this card just after New Year from my aunt:
I’ve seen this before but I still find it fairly funny and it is a useful reminder of the problems with trying to shoehorn a physical / applied situation onto a maths problem!
Over the last couple of years I have particularly enjoyed teaching and writing interesting questions that concern Vieta’s Formulae. These relate the sums of products of roots of polynomials to the coefficients of the polynomial.
I have always liked these, and have a very vivid memory of a Russian lecturer in one of my first undergraduate lectures expressing surprise that we weren’t formally taught them as part of the normal A-Level in Maths. He confidently told us that in Russia they are done in primary school!
Last year I created a card sort for this topic which turned out to be trickier than I anticipated. It has taken two different classes now a whole lesson to complete but it has generate some fantastic mathematical discussions.
If you download the file to use in the classroom from here I would love to know what you think.
Sometimes being late with posting has it’s advantages!
Thursday 3rd January was deemed a day to celebrate the number 1/3. It was named Thirdsday by James Propp (@JimPropp) who has written a fascinating and very detailed post about why he thinks 1/3 deserves more recognition and some interesting facts about 1/3 here.
Since this post lots of cool things have been written on the theme of Thirdsday and Matt Parker (@standupmaths) has produced an excellent video:
Unfortunately being late to posting also has its drawbacks. I was going to talk about the classic geometric series
\( \frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{16} + \frac{1}{64} + \frac{1}{256} +\cdots \)which converges to a third. However the excellent Zoe Griffiths st Think Maths has already published a lovely classroom activity involving this.
Over at The Aperiodical they have rounded up some nice Thirdsday related posts.
I’ve put a reminder in my phone to spend some time preparing a more interesting post in time for the next Thirdsday – 3/1/30 Keep an eye out for that…
Watching an episode of Peppa Pig this morning (Season 3, Episode 11) I was quite excited to see the quadratic formula on a board at Daddy Pig’s work.
I found it interesting that they wrote it with the \( \bigtriangleup \) notation. I always introduce this notation for the discriminant but have never actually used it in the quadratic formula.
As it is New Year’s Day and I am beginning to think about getting students ready for the next round of exams in May/June it seems a sensible time to share the brief reflections I wrote on the 2018 Series of AS and A-Level mary’s exams. They focus on the AQA papers as that is the board I am currently using.
The cumulative grade boundaries were interesting to look at.
Download the file here if you want to read them.
How could you estimate:
