The last of the March exams will soon be over (*you will hear the nations maths teachers breathe a sigh of relief at 10:45 on Monday*) and we’re working with the vast majority of our students on improving on their grade C’s (and above in some cases). Early entry is a contentious issue for some teachers, but we don’t stop at a grade C … we continue teaching them right until the very end with the aim of giving them every opportunity to improve their grade and have seen our A/A* increase in the last two years from 5% to 15% which is phenomenal.

With this in mind and together with the fact that I may inherit a set 1 and a set 2 for next few weeks (through illness in the department) I have been thinking about planning lessons to push these students on. One of the top end topics that I just love to teach is fractional and negative indices – as part of the main lesson I intend to use a “what’s the story” worksheet that I have previously made (this has been recommended on TES twice!), so to complement this I have also made a “connect 4” style worksheet that I am going to use as a starter the next lesson. This is a new type of worksheet  (HERE), based on similar ones I’ve seen on the Guardian teacher network (so I’m not going to claim credit for the idea!) that I have used before and the students really seem to enjoy.

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