I’ve been a bit remiss with this blogging lark, for which you must forgive me. It’s that time of year when the focus has to be our year 11’s … actually I had a few days away at Easter and since we’ve been back at work I’ve been busy putting together our alternate timetable for the exam period (we don’t have study leave) and … well … you know how it is if you work in a school. Mental. I love it though.

In other news I arrived home from my trip to a surprise from the Maths team at Edexcel who must have been stalking (in a nice way obviously!) my twitter timeline (they can’t hide anymore because Graham and Mark now have a Twitter account @EmporiumMaths … yay!!)  – I tweeted about how cool this was and lo and behold I now have a Batman eggcup!! Chuffed to bits … dippy eggs for tea this evening!

In terms of work … I’ve been thinking about how to get year 11 students doing that regular practise of topics that they have learnt but need to keep fresh in their memory (think about interleaving topics!) but are not just more past papers. So I’ve put together some papers that I’m emailing out to parents every week. They are questions from past papers from Edexcels “Exam Wizard” but I’ve used the modular and IGCSE papers so they’re questions that they won’t (in the main) have seen before. The idea is that they follow our “Top 40” topics and each week I’ve included between 8 and 10 of the topics – I’ve also done a separate document for each of the weeks that includes a mark scheme but also comments from the examiners report so that the students can see where the common mistakes are made. So far the response has been ace!

You’ll find the documents for week 1 of my final countdown here-> Part 1 – Final Countdown – Questions and Part 1 – Final Countdown – Examiners Report & Markscheme. I’ve put these and weeks 2 and 3  on JustMathsOnline (in extras/miscellaneous Top 40 I think) and I’ll continue to email them out every week until the exam and don’t forget to keep an eye out for our best guess paper … WARNING: it’s actually not meant to be a “guess” about what topics will appear – it is more a collection of questions that haven’t appeared on paper 1. Again, it comes back to this interleaved practice and making sure they get a “refresh” on some of the more common calculator topics.

Putting together these weekly papers meant that it’s the first time I’ve used exam wizard since I tried a while ago when it first went online and I have to say it has improved so much – I just wish the labelling of the question types was a bit more specific, It would save loads of time not having to view each question if I knew from the title that it was say “Translations” rather than “Geometry” (or whatever vague name it was). It’s a minor gripe and I’ll live with it because apart from that it is fab!

My final bit of news is that the school at which we work in our day jobs (well two-thirds of the JustMaths team anyway) received letters this week saying that it had been shortlisted for two TES awards: One is for our head of Art, James Yarrington for Art teacher of the year and the second was for the whole Maths Department for Maths teacher/Team of the year. Wow. Just Wow!

I’ve got so much to blog about (I’m feeling like I’ve got my mojo back!) but so very little time and this weekend my hubbie turns 50 –  I am a lot (OK … a “bit”) younger than him and I can’t believe I’m married to a 50 year old and yes I have said that to him! He was not impressed!  So we’re away for a couple of nights … see you on the other side!

PS: I’ll be posting the “little bit of maths every day” calendar for May by Sunday evening for those of you that have emailed me asking about it.