UK Department for Education Examinations Timetable

Once again – examinations draw near; with the timing of the Easter holidays the number of lessons left with our examination classes is small! My lower school classes also have tests coming up, so I find myself yet again thinking about revision. I do try and build in regular review and revision into our everyday lessons and I thought it would be useful to note various ideas and resources for review and revision in one collection. Where I have written on a resource before I have linked to the original post where you will find further details.

Short Basic Recall Questions
These are ideal for use anytime as perhaps a lesson starter.
Dynamic Maths from David Watkins

Dynamic Maths – David Watkins

MathsBox now a (very good value in my opinion) subscription site has an extensive collection of quality resources, there are many free samples so you can see and use several very useful resources. The settlers and Bingo activities are ideal for a series of short recall / revision type questions.  I do like the attractive presentation of the resources on this site (as well as the content of course!)

Bingo from Mathsbox

There are thousands of diagnostic questions available on Craig Barton’s and Somon Woodhead’s Diagnostic questions site.

Diagnostic Questions – Craig Barton & Simon Woodhead

As shown in this post it is possible to create a slideshow of the questions you want for your class. Note the ever growing collection of questions, including a section for post 16 students.

Mega Maths Quiz from Ben Cooper

Further sites with a series of short questions include Maths Teaching – Higher Level Revision Activities and on TES resources, also on his own site, Ben Cooper’s amazing (and huge!) collection of multiple choice questions covering many topics.

Other Suggested Revision Activities

• Here’s the diagram – what’s the question
• The Collective Memory resources on TES can make an excellent revision activity, students look at posters and then have to understand and recall that information. These can be used in a variety of ways which are fully described in the article. (A further set of resources is available here). Last year my GCSE students created several posters of their own which they found a very useful revision activity.
• Mini-tests (or self checks)
• Treasure Hunts – see the resources on Mathsbox for some lovely resources. These will get students moving round the room. On the subject of moving round the room, you could try an activity using post-its; see for example this Surds post-it challenge on TES.
• Tarsia puzzles, these are available for all ages including post 16.

Examination Questions
Of course! You do not have to just work through a paper though – try questions on a theme or all A* questions! As usual there is no need to reinvent the wheel because there are generous teachers out there who have shared their resources. Steve Blades has an astonishing collection of 100 hard GCSE questions – all with fully worked solutions (and note all the other lovely resources on his site). Dan Walker on TES has created a mock paper which has only A* questions! You will be pleased to know that Dan’s resource includes model solutions!

On TES I really like Tom Riley’s resource – exam questions and solutions but also with clues! Students match up the clues to a collection of exam questions on 10 higher topics, then use the clues to answer the questions. Something I do in the run up to exams is try questions in timed conditions as I think that is valuable – even for very short sessions. I work out how long they should have according to the number of marks (telling them to start another question if they finish or are stuck), it strikes me that I can make this an even more valuable exercise if I provide clues on the back of the questions that they can look at (or not!)