I've been catastrophically bad at blog posts this month. Since Year 11 disappeared, I've been full steam ahead on adapting the Mastery Pathway schemes we've been using this year, including planning how we will continue this for our current Year 9s into 10. The end of term seems to get more hectic every year, and there's lots going on at school. I'm working on some supporting materials for our KS3 curriculum, including a website for pupils and redesigning our approach to homework. I've also got my wedding coming up next month, so real life is also eating into potential blogging and website maintenance time.

So this is just a quick post to say that normal blogging service will be resumed at some point during the summer holidays - I'm hoping to be able to post lots of new resources and ideas over the summer for teaching in September, as well as sharing a lot of the mastery materials I've been working on. Updates will be on Twitter, so watch this space!

I've written quite a few posts recently about using ratio tables extensively in my teaching for proportional reasoning. Following the explosion on Twitter about Edexcel's non-calculator paper last Thursday, I thought it might be time for a critical evaluation on my part of just how useful (or not!) they are in tackling any or all of the proportional reasoning problems on the most recent paper, particularly if we should see this as an indicator of things to come, as @El_Timbre suggested in this brilliant blog post on Sunday. 

I'm approaching this from the point of view of pupils aiming for a grade C, as I've had borderline groups for the last two years, and no top GCSE sets for about four, due to having plenty of A Level Maths on my timetable already, so I'll admit that my pedagogy and knowledge of grade A/A* topics at GCSE is fairly limited.

Reflections on a year of teaching the Mastery pathway (mastery mathematics) at Key Stage 3.

NOTE: If you are a pupil looking for Mastery Pathway homeworks, you need to click here.