I quite often duck when I hear or read the words on an email “I don’t suppose you have something for teaching … ” but then have a hunt around and find something that fits the bill. However, when approached for something about “3d shapes” for the Guardian I could only find an exit card worksheet for nets of cuboids, so I spent some time on Christmas Eve putting together one of my “Whodunnit” worksheets  here about volume and surface area and am really looking forward to using it next term – it starts with properties such as faces, edges and vertices and I’m going to give it to students to so the “who” part as a starter to the main lesson. I find that students get confused when the topics are taught discretely and so like to teach them together. When we look at volume of prisms, they always say “easy miss, its length x width x height” for EVERY shape that they see and I spend loads of time looking at the cross sectional areas and I get them to “unlearn” what they’ve been taught before so that they can apply this to every type of prism that they are likely to come across. I’ve also included different units too, just to make it that little bit more challenging.

If you are teaching “nets” (here) is the exit card that I’ve used in the past. I’ve used it in the traditional sense of an exit card after a lesson where the students have created street scenes using different nets of shapes: cuboids for skyscrapers, triangular prisms as pitched roofs on top of cuboids, and square based pyramids on tops of cubes for detached houses. I have also used it as a starter for a lesson about congruency with my set 1 for GCSE as no doubt they will produce some nets that aren’t unique and its a great way of them exploring when shapes are, or aren’t congruent.

Now for the last one … I am in no way taking the credit for this – the original was put together by Seager  (I know!!!) for his intervention groups in year 11 – it was handwritten but worked really well, so all I’ve done is pretty it up. It’s a set of dominoes (here) for Pythagoras – the last question is trig though so that students aren’t just following a process every time, and it keeps them on their toes.