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It may be the calm before exam season, but that’s no reason to rest on your laurels. It’s hard enough keeping students motivated at the best of times, not least when they’re now well established into the routines of the new term. Luckily, help is at hand.

Once again, the generous and talented members of the TES Maths community have come up with the goods, creating and sharing unique lesson resources to help you to revitalise old topics and discover interesting ways to teach new ones. Why not take a look for yourself?

Craig Barton, TES Maths adviser

New GCSE specification

• Venn diagrams introduction
  Introduce classes to Venn diagrams and the accompanying set notation with this simple lesson, which makes the topic less abstract through the use of pictures.
• Iteration practice questions
  Complete with an engaging starter, a step-by-step presentation and a tricky worksheet, this lesson is ideal for helping pupils get to grips with the fundamentals of this new GCSE topic.

Factors and primes

• Prime factor decomposition puzzle
  Combining the best elements of a logic puzzle with the revision of finding prime factors, this unique task is a great way of adding richness and challenge while practising a key skill.
• Finding factors hints poster
  Help pupils to speed up the process of finding factors of large numbers by displaying this top tips poster in your classroom. Or, for a more regular reminder, why not get them to stick a copy in their books?

Negative numbers

• Directed numbers worksheet
  Use this problem-solving task to get learners adding and subtracting directed numbers in the context of weather, including a handy visual in the form of a bar chart.
• Negative numbers codebreaker
  Recap key principles about the addition and subtraction of negative numbers with this simple but effective codebreaker activity, useful as a starter for more-able classes.

Advanced coordinate geometry

• Facial expressions presentation
  Test pupils’ knowledge of the basics shapes of a variety of functions, including reciprocal, circles and cubics, by matching them up to faces in this engaging activity.
• Exponential growth and decay
  With links to real-life applications and dynamic graphing software, this well-structured lesson neatly introduces the concept to older students.