This searchable collection, Mudd Math Fun Facts from Harvey Mudd College Math Department, has resources that can make great starter activities. Perhaps try Squares Ending in 5 and Multiplication by 11both made excellent starters. I have looked at proofs for these with students as well as enjoying the mental Maths tricks!
It is possible to search by topic, difficulty level and keywords.Examples to try:
These all come from the lightning arithmetic category, where we also find Squaring Quickly. In each article, you will find presentation suggestions – ideas for presenting to students, the math behind the fact, and references.
It’s that time of year again, and we can play the 2025 NCTM Year Game in our January lessons. Use the digits in the year 2025 and the operations +, −, x, ÷, sqrt (square root), ^ (raise to a power), ! (factorial), and !! (double factorial) along with grouping symbols to write expressions for the counting numbers 1 through 100.; full rules are here.
Playing this with younger students has been an opportunity to introduce the factorial function, and we tend to stray into double factorials as students are curious. A good exercise in algebra for your older students – can they find a relationship between the single and double factorial functions?
Excel has a function for computing double factorials, illustrated here. I like to show my students a few examples and see if they can work out what is going on.
For further properties of 2025 – see Numbers APlenty for numerous properties, including the fact that 2025 is the sum of the first 9 cubes. 2025 is the square of a triangular number, so we have:
We can also check WolframAlpha for number properties of 2025.
2025 is a perfect square which reminds me of this mental Maths idea I have often used:
Thank you to Andrew Jeffrey for alerting me to Inder Jeet Taneja’s site, Numbers Magic, in his January Newsletter.
Sarah Carter has several lovely New Year 2025 activities, including a challenge and several puzzles on her excellent M + A + T + H = love blog. You can find all the activities here.
Returning to WolframAlpha we can see what 2025 looks like in historical numeral forms. We could use the various historical numerals examples to learn how Babylonian, for example, numerals work. I have successfully used this as an interesting starter for January lessons.
The Babylonian system was a positional base 60 system, though interestingly uses ‘units’ and ‘tens’ symbols to create the 59 symbols needed.
We could look back and use the excellent MacTutor History of Mathematics from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. We could check today or any day for Mathematicians who were born or died on that day.
Further Christmas resources are available on this page.
KS3/GCSE
On TES, a collection of Pixel Art activities is available from TomTeaches. We have GCSE revision on solving quadratics and several other resources including Indices, Linear equations which you can find from this search.
For some interactive Christmas colouring try this activity on Transum where students colour in the Christmas picture according to the properties of the numbers.
Dr Austin Maths
From Amanda Austin on Dr Austin Maths, the activity “Plotting Quadratic Graphs Create-a-Picture” is a great task for plotting quadratic graphs.
For some Christmas drawing activities, on TES, try:
A Level Christmas Colouring is a TES resource where students revise much of the Year 1 content and some Year 2 content.
FP1 Christmas Colouring
Or for Further Maths, try FP1, a TES resource. The questions are appropriate for Core Maths. You have a choice of versions, Normal – colours are what you would expect, Funk Christmas – colours are all mixed up!
I like OCR’s puzzles, so am very pleased to see these on Bluesky now. Follow the link for several puzzles. You should be able to access these whether or not you are on Bluesky. There are many Maths teachers on Bluesky now, and I have seen many good mathematical conversations.
Here's the first festive #OCRMathspuzzle of the season! 🎄 Each festive symbol in the grid below represents a square number.The sum of each row and the sum of each column are given.Work out the value of each festive symbol.#maths #teacher #puzzle #resource #arithmetic #number #UKMathsChat
Made a new arithmetic sequence puzzle for my students to try out. Can you complete the "crossword puzzle" so that each entry is an arithmetic sequence? mathequalslove.net/arithmetic-s…#mtbos #iteachmath #puzzlingclassroom #mathsky #edusky
It’s that time of year, I have created a page on Christmas Cards which you can access from the right-hand menu.
Chalkdust Christmas Card 2024
For the last few years, I have made Christmas Cards for students using Chalkdust resources. MatthewScroggs designed the 2024 Chalkdust card. You can use an interactive or PDF version.
…And finally, what will be revealed by Corbettmaths today?!
I'll be unveiling the exciting project on Sunday at midday! 🎉 #SoExcited
Now it’s December – you can open Transum door 1 to reveal this gem!
Transum Maths Advent Calendar
I do like this Dec 1st Transum activity. Use the given palette to make sure that all the trees are decorated differently – brilliant for thinking about systematic listing strategies. Note the different levels available.
Look at the collections on Nrich on Working Systematically.
Nrich publishes annual Advent Calendars – one for Primary (2024) and one for Secondary (2024). Both feature twenty-four problems, one for each day in the run-up to Christmas. Nrich states that the problems are ideal for working on collaboratively, either with friends at school, or with friends and family members at home. A real strength of Nrich – solutions are published which are based on students’ work.
It’s nearly Christmas and something terrible has happened: there’s been a major malfunction in multiple machines in Santa’s toy factory, and not enough presents have been made. Santa has a backup warehouse full of wrapped presents that can be used in the case of severe emergency, but the warehouse is locked. You need to help Santa work out the code to unlock the warehouse so that he can deliver the presents before Christmas is ruined for everyone. Matthew Scroggs – Advent 2024
A little bit of Christmas is on the way!A new resource will be shared each day for the first 12 days of December – primary/Secondary/post16Daily links shared here or links on our websitePlease repost…Free to everyone.
