Tuesday 21 July 2015

10ticks Level 9/10 or the new GCSE?

A while since my last post I know - a well earned break following the end of the school year (which for Leicestershire was the 10th of July) and I have now re-turned my attention to making sure we are well resourced for next year. It was while doing this I came across a great little find...

I think every maths teacher has at some point used 10ticks. Rarely an entire sheet (although I have known some teachers use a whole sheet for homework or a follow-up lesson) but certainly stealing parts of it. When I first started my career the school I worked at only had access to Levels 3 up to 7/8, and like many new teachers (as I was at the time) I had trained in the era when Level 9 or 10 were no longer really talked about, even though the original National Curriculum did cast its gaze to those lofty heights. When I encountered the Level 9/10 worksheets in my second school, I had a cursory glance, and haven't had much cause to glance that way again, save for the odd top-end trig or volume resource. Imagine my delight then when going back through I read the contents list again for 10ticks Level 9/10.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the people designing the new KS4 programme of study didn't have one eye on this document when they were writing the new content - so richly is it found here. A brief summary if I may:

Pack 1 - Accuracy of Measurement, Variation, Indices (negative and fractional), compound growth and decay, Surds and irrationals (including in trigonometry), approximating root 2 by iteration.

Pack 2 - Trigonometry, Tree diagrams, solving quadratics by factorising, quadratic sequences, completing the square and the quadratic formula.

Pack 3 - Ratio, Scale Factors and Similar triangles, Congruence, Distributions, Histograms.

Pack 4 - Graphs and Equations (including circle equations), Volume and Surface area of curved shapes, Density, Algebraic fractions, Transforming formulae, transforming graphs.

Pack 5 - Vectors, Proof, Distance/Velocity - Time graphs including curves, Perpendiculars.

Pack 6 - Set notation, Venn Diagrams (after lots of matrices stuff).

Now if I were looking for a list of things that fit somewhere in the 3 part Venn diagram of Content new in Foundation tier, Content new in Higher tier, Content crucial for further study beyond GCSE I think this would be quite a reasonable list, and I think many maths teachers would agree with me. I haven't had chance to look through all of the individual pages yet, but undoubtedly some gems await.

So if you are preparing for the new GCSE over the summer, or even over the course of teaching next year, don't neglect an old faithful resource like 10ticks; it might just surprise you.

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