I know! I know! I know! I am meant to be on holiday but it takes me a couple of days to wind down … and the pressure of exams looming for year 11’s never seems to go away even when away from school I find myself thinking about what else we could be doing! The main priority for me at the minute though “holiday wise” is catching up on all my bloody housework and dealing with the mountain of paperwork that has piled up over the last 7 weeks! In fact the only reason I’m posting this is because I’ve put another load of washing in the machine and I’m waiting for it to finish before I have to go out! Not quite sure you can call that multi-tasking!

So Friday I gave my year 11 their mock results and we went through the paper – there were quite a few facepalm moments from them I can tell you! A couple even asked if they could go on my “maths criminals” board for their crimes against maths! Overall though I am quite pleased and so were they in the main, but they also know that they can’t sit back and relax just yet. What was nice though is that they appreciate we haven’t got many lessons together left and really want to just get on with the work when they come in … I really am going to miss them when they go, this  Summer – which will also see the last few members of my original tutor group leaving year 13. I remember meeting most of them on the induction day and I can honestly say they’ve been the best tutor group I’ve ever had! (they have been my only tutor group I’ve had!!).

Anyway, back to year 11 … we’ve gone through the Edexcel Nov 13 papers and I now want the groups to get more practice. It’s not for the reason that some people would accuse me of i.e. exam practice but more because I like them to have to “switch and change” between topics as we tend to teach maths in very discrete chunks (ok, so there will be some crossover with some topics when  they are taught). As a result of mulling this over, I’ve spent some time replicating the November papers (Seager actually redrafted the questions  for me – so I can’t take all the credit!) but with different numbers or changing the question slightly, which you can see below where I’ve shown the adapted question next to the original:

Spot the difference

I’ve also produced annotated solutions for both my alternative papers and also the original exams (see pic below!) that I’m going to add to our VLE next week  … I am really loving the idea of alternative papers as we can also use them for homework or even internal assessments.