Author: tombennison

Back in March I saw the tweet shown below from Mike Lawler (@mikeandallie).

I think I would default to substituting \( u = \mathrm{e}^x \) here but in the thread were a range of different approaches. Tim Gower’s (@wtgowers) was particularly inventive.

I’ve always enjoyed asking students to integrate things in different ways and then asking them to show their solutions are equivalent. A favourite one of mine is \(\int \sin(x) \cos(x) \ \mathrm{d}x \). Because of this I have made a sheet asking students to explore a few of the possible methods.

The sheet for printing to A3 can be downloaded here.

For preparation for Year 12 Mocks I made my class an AS Further Revision clock activity. My Year 13s have also done it.

The file can be found here.

A fair while ago I wrote an FP1 Revision Relay for the old specification.

I have recently written one that targets the Vectors content of (predominantly) AS-Level Further Maths. 

The intention is that it is used like the UKMT Senior Team Challenge relays, in fact that is how I used it last week with my Year 13 Further Mathematicians. Students work in pairs – one of them answering the odd numbered questions and one of them answering the even questions and passing the solutions between them.

If you would like to give it a go download the file to use here.

Short post as I need to go to bed!!

I have made my first Revision Clock activity for the new syllabus.

Please let me know if you use the file located here with your classes, I would love some feedback.

So this was meant to be posted on Monday evening and time has got away with me. Hence an early Tuesday morning post.

Something a bit different as im sharing a revision sheet I made for my Year 11 Level2 Further Maths students last week’s. It covers matrix transformations and has some brief notes plus a few exercises. I guess it could be used to revise the basics of transformations for Year 12.

File Here.

Solutions here.

Just another card sort to share this Sunday… This one concerns parametric equations and invoice curve sketching, converting to cartesian form, differentiating parametric equations and parametric integration.

Feel free to use: Download here.

Only 10 days late sharing this one…. On the plus side I am looking forward to next year and thinking that these will all already exist and be ready to use 🙂

This month I have gone for a mixed range of questions testing student’s essential skills ready for the exam.

File available here for your students to use.

I’ve recently been having a bit of a play with the Desmos Activity Builder and they have recently added an ordered list component. Because of this I have created a Desmos activity that explores proof by contradiction. This isn’t an area of mathematics I would naturally think to use Desmos for, but I have used this activity for revision with one of my classes and it seemed to go well.

The first screen is also my first real attempt at using the Desmos Computation layer, specifically I use the aggregate function to make a box plot of students estimates of \(\sqrt{2}\). Over the summer I want to explore CL properly and have a few ideas on how to improve this activity – watch this space.

Please use this activity and give me any feedback. Find it here.

Just a very short post tonight to share a small cardsort / set of questions I wrote to provide a quick bit of revision if the different proof techniques and promote some discussion in the classroom.

Download the file to use here.

My students have been asking for more practice papers for AQA Further Mathematics as there aren’t many..

I’ve ended up writing some of what I am calling “sort of mock” papers. I don’t pretend that they are completely true reflections of the real mock papers but I hope that they at least have the correct “flavour”.

The first one I have done is one for the mechanics option. I suspect they may be useful for other boards too but check it before using them.

If you want to use it the paper is here and mark scheme (more like my handwritten solutions!!) here.