These resources can now be found on a page, Fill in the blanks, part of the Problems & Activities Collection. New activities have been added to this original collection.

There is also a good deal of evidence that the use of worked examples can
be helpful in introducing new ideas (Booth et al., 2017; Sweller et al., 2019).
Particularly effective are ‘completion problems’ where students are given
partial solutions and required to complete them. These can help students to
focus on the examples but also manage the difficulty level while retaining
authentic tasks

Great Teaching Toolkit – Evidence Review, June 2020 Rob Coe, C.J. Rauch, Stuart Kime, Dan Singleton

In dimension 4, Activating Hard Thinking, we see this element on explaining. Part-worked examples can be so useful when presenting new concepts and ideas to students.

So this week, a collection of fill in the blanks type resources.

The trigonometry activity above is from Andy Lutwyche; Andy has other resources in his fill in the blanks series. Searching his TES resources on “fill in the blanks“, returns other fill in the blanks resources and also other resources where students must complete missing information such as his What was the question or Spiders collections. Some of Andy’s latest resources include his Lazy Lionel resources, Lionel does not show his working, so loses marks! We also have Hasty Hazel and Methodical Mabel, this really is excellent and I’m sure can promote excellent conversations in the classroom on misconceptions and showing sufficient working. And I must include Andy’s brilliant resource on the quadratic formula.

So many teachers share their resources, for more of this type of activity, try the following:

From Jonathan Hall on Mathsbot, try his Directed Number.

• On Dr Austin Maths, you will find several Fill In The Blanks resources in many topic areas
• Starting Points Maths, Chris McGrane has many completion type resources
• Purposeful Maths, for I do, we do, you do resources
• On TickTockMaths, try Rationalising the denominator
• Access Maths, see this search on “Fill in the blanks“
• Nathan Day – Interwoven Maths – Factor Trees
• Rob Southern has this Coordinate Geometry exercise as part of his A Level Pure 1 Year 1 collection. Note his questions to consider. You can also find a version on Transum, Coordinate Geometry Table which allows answers to be checked.
• Open Middle has numerous problems where students must fill empty boxes to make correct statements
• Undergound Maths, Two-way functions

I have used these excellent PhET simulations for many years, a page on the PhET Interactive Simulations has been available for some time. I have now created an index to the Math HTML5 sims by topic area which includes the topics covered by each simulation.

Remember that teachers can register with PhET and gain access to comprehensive supporting documentation for each resource.

 See for example the supporting documentation for Trig Tour.