One of our year groups is very boy-heavy and for some reason this is particularly evident with one of my classes that only has about 7 girls. Please don’t get me wrong – I don’t usually “pigeon-hole” students but it’s like pulling teeth getting some of them to show their working out. I know its an age old issue, and I’m not looking for a panacea but what I am going to do it is show all of them how important this is, especially when it comes to their final exams.

With this in mind I’ve put the attached 5 exam questions (from Edexcels Sample paper, but they will be equally valid for any exam board), which I’m going to use as a starter over the next few lessons –  I think I am going to ask them to work in pairs and then  in fours to mark the work using the mark scheme. (Get your brain into gear 5 – Revision and Markscheme Starters) I’ve included a worked solution that I’ve done for each of the questions that will hopefully allow them to compare the amount of work I’ve shown and what they will have done.

Whilst there is a lot of text in terms of the mark scheme for them to interpret we’ve used a couple of mark schemes in the past, and I’m going to use my ipad to display and annotate a couple of  good and bad examples from students (willing I might add!) that we can mark as a whole group, which will help them mark their own.