It’s December…it’s that time of year again…!
A collection of Mathematical Advent Calendars.
For advent calendars, the year doesn’t really matter, but this page will be updated with any new resources. Watch his space for any further calendars published in 2023.
From a favourite site, where you can find so many excellent resources, Transum has an Advent Calendar. Behind each door, you will find a Christmaths activity, laugh at a cracker joke and solve a mathematical word puzzle.
(See this post for more on Transum.)
Try this Mathsvent Calendar from Phil Bruce. For December 1st put the baubles in size order along the tinsel starting with the smallest at the bottom.
Very usefully, you can find all 24 puzzles listed by topic. These puzzles are great, extensions are given for many of the problems too.
For a collection of starters aimed at KS3 students try this Christmas Maths Advent Starter Calendar from MrCsMaths. This provides a nice mix of activities.
From Matthew Scroggs – try his Advent Calendar for 2023; behind each day (except Christmas Day), there is a puzzle with a three-digit answer; solve the puzzles to help Santa!
It’s nearly Christmas and something terrible has happened: a machine in Santa’s toy factory has malfunctioned, and is unable to finish building all the presents that Santa needs. You need to help Santa work out how to fix the broken machine so that he can build the presents and deliver them before Christmas is ruined for everyone.
Matthew Scroggs – Advent 2023
J Calderwood has provided three Advent Calendars – Advanced Higher, Higher and N5 Maths for Scottish Students. A great revision resource which could be adapted for different courses.
From Andy Lutwyche we have his Christmas Advent Calendar which covers lots of different topics in number, algebra, shape & space and data and gets progressively more difficult as you go on.
Also from Andy, try his Advent Calendar – Solving Linear Equations. Students answer the questions (the solutions are 1 to 24) and each answer links to a word; when the words are put in numerical order an entire joke is revealed! And another…for older students, Differentiation Advent Calendar where students are asked to find the gradient of a curve at a given point. Cheesy joke included!
Another from Andy, this “Advent” Calendar is a set of GCSE Higher non-calculator questions. Full answers are provided on a series of slides.
Further revision calendars are included later in this post.
Staying with a calculus theme, I use Dr Tom Bennison’s Integration a day Advent Calendar annually – perfect for year 13 (UK age 17-18).
Nrich publishes annual Advent Calendars – one for Primary (2022) and one for Secondary (2022). Both feature twenty-four activities, one for each day in the run-up to Christmas; for 2022 the calendars have twenty-four poster problems. Both Nrich and Plus Magazine have published such good collections of Advent resources, clearly, for an Advent Calendar, the year does not matter so we have lots of choices! See for example this whole collection of advent calendars on Nrich, note the different themes available – a Sudoku for each day perhaps? The 2016 Primary Calendar featured tasks to encourage mathematical habits of mind something we need to encourage in students of all ages.
The Indisputable Santa Mathematical Advent Calendar comes from Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Thomas Oléron Evans who throughout December 2016, to accompany the release of their book on the Mathematics of Christmas, tweeted out Christmathsy bits and pieces, one a day, advent calendar style.
From the brilliant Mathigon site, see Puzzles 2022, more coming in December 2023 I suspect, and perhaps have a look back at their puzzles from earlier years…
On Teachit Maths, see their Interactive advent calendar. Remember that the free subscription (scroll down for the free option) on this excellent site includes many high-quality pdf resources. Teachit Maths describes the resource as an advent calendar in the form of a presentation focusing mainly on mathematics. Suitable for KS3/4. (KS3/4 is UK age 11-16). For each day you will reveal a festive fact, joke, teaching idea, activity or game.
there is also a calendar for your Science colleagues from Teachit:
Alternatively how about a Christmas Revision Calendar from Access Maths? Three Christmas Calendars are available, one for KS3, and two for GCSE – Foundation and one for Higher.
Alternatively, try this higher GCSE revision quiz, very attractively presented as an Advent calendar, answers are included.
From Mark Dawes try this lovely resource with problem-solving tasks for use in maths lessons in December. Suitable for starter activities, they span a range of abilities in KS3 and KS4. As well as the calendar the resource includes worksheets for some of the problems and a file of Teacher notes. Note Mark’s instructions for the PowerPoint file (on the first slide) which enable you to choose the task you want whichever number is clicked on.
Alex Pett created his advent calendar complete with history and problems for each day. Alex has provided a pdf version or use as a Google document. For an Activeinspire resource, try this version.
Another Advent Calendar to check is Mark Anderson’s Appvent, and I am delighted to see that the first entry is Jonathan Halls’s brilliant Form Time Ideas, and remember you can also use Form Time Numeracy.
