As part of the AMSP’s support to schools and colleges during lockdown, we have provided a set of Year 11 to Year 12 transition materials which are now freely available on our website. They are designed for students to use on their own, as full solutions are given, and there are around three hours of work in each unit. There are also teacher notes for the transition resources on our website.
As part of the team involved in collating and writing these resources, I wanted to add a bit more detail about our thoughts behind producing these and our rationale.
The team involved are all experienced teachers and know about the many transition materials already out there. We wanted to make these resources in a way that would get students to recognise that many skills are transferable and used in lots of different ways. For example, we took ‘Simplifying’ and used that with fractions, surds and indices, as simplifying goes across many concepts. We then decided that we would give students the chance to check their basic understanding of the concepts, followed by problems that would allow students to explore these a bit more fully and perhaps extend. Finally, we wanted students to see the richness of maths and to explore the concept or another mathematical idea beyond GCSE, or even A level sometimes. This section is called ‘Still Want More?’ and might include a mathematical task, reading, or watching a video.
One of our priorities was to make the resources easy for teachers to use with students, so our intention is that students can work on the resources independently. To that end, we have provided hints, solutions and even some videos for students. Of course, if teachers want to be involved then they can be, encouraging students to do as little or as much as they wish from the sections.