If it was your new year's resolutio

If it was your new year's resolution to jazz up your maths lessons, then the Guardian Teacher Network can help you achieve your aim. We have a multitude of imaginative maths teaching resources including worksheets and inspirational teaching ideas.

We'll start off with a song. Mr A, of crazy teaching trio Mr A, Mr C and Mr D, presents prime numbers as you've never heard them before. Optimus Prime and 90s pop are combined to create a unique way of remembering prime numbers. Here's the song and here are the lyrics. Once heard, never forgotten.

More advanced work with primes is explored by maths teacher Mel Muldowney, who has shared a number of lively maths worksheets and ideas that should make for some energetic maths lessons or fun homework. See this Product of prime factors must, should and could worksheet. Within each category there are different levels so students can work across then down if they want more practice or just straight down if they want a challenge that equals some some hassle-free embedded differentiation.


Prime numbers come up again in this amusing classifying worksheet in which students are asked to sort out a pressing problem. A group of maths teachers have brought their collection of Lego mini figures into school, but now they are mixed up. Unfortunately they can't remember which figures belong to whom and so, being typical maths teachers, they agree to share them using some mathematical rules. So teacher A will have all the factors of 36 and teacher B will have all the prime numbers etc. Students need to work out which teachers should get which mini figure. And here's the additional sheet of answers.

Children get to solve a school-based murder mystery using maths in this whodunnit activity. Questions include ones where the range of the solution is given and ones where there is no range given, and also from equations with single value of x to ones including squares and cubes. This engaging activity should help students to understand the subtleties in the different type of equation, as well as work out who killed who, where and when.

A Mission Impossible-style worksheet on estimating the mean can be used as a plenary/mid-lesson assessment or even an extension activity depending on the group. Also see this excellent Division must, should and could worksheet.

In Converting between metric units of length students need to evaluate statements made by four teachers of different disciplines and work out which teacher has made the most mistakes. It can be used in conjuntion with this worksheet.


This classic collective memory game explores Pythagoras Theorem – with a twist that the answers are wrong and the students have to correct them on their version of the poster. This makes a great plenary for teachers who have covered finding both the hypotenuse and one of the shorter sides.

Most children love playing top trumps, so here's an inspired way to teach percentages with this I'm a Celebrity top trumps maths game. The cards vary in difficulty so sets can be used by children of different abilities. Students can also practise their percentages with this Ever wondered why? worksheet.

Exam boards have been known to ask two-way table questions that don't include a table. So this worksheet looks at "wordy" maths questions – it's a nice starter for the lesson after teaching two-way tables or a possible plenary in the lesson. For more information on Mel Muldowney's maths ideas see www.justmaths.co.uk.

Rob Eastaway (author of Maths for Mums and Dads and the soon to be published More Maths for Mums and Dads - The Teenage years) has shared four ways to inject creativity into your maths lessons including: number tricks, find the centre of a triangle and symmetry. His ideas are particularly helpful for non-specialist maths teachers in primary schools who may feel a bit overwhelmed in their maths teaching and play it too safe (and boring) as a consequence. For secondary school teachers see three fantastic activity ideas that will excite your students here including Circle theorems - find the middle and probability distributions.

Reception and key stage 1 pupils can measure Ronika's house. Ronika is a little girl who lives in a slum in Kenya. This practical learning activity is part of a whole set of resources for Red Nose Day 2013 to help develop children's understanding of the world.

This resource of the month from the Guardian Education Centre and Archive combines history and maths in an exploration of the Guardian and Observer's circulation figures and readership from 1946, where they also get to compare the hand-drawn charts of the past to the interactive data available today.

And finally, non-maths specialists can embed some numeracy into their lessons by using English teacher Alan Gillespie's unorthodox ideas. He uses Oulipo techniques to combine maths and writing, creating works using patterned writing techniques. Intrigued? Find Alan's PowerPoint lesson here, and you can find out more in the Guardian Teacher Network's new maths hub.

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