This rich task from Cre8ate introduces students to a Latin Square, where each row and each column has all the variables once and only once. Students may be aware of Sudoku puzzles which are based on this scenario. They are challenged to find 12 different designs which...

One of a series of resources from Science & Plants for Schools (SAPS) investigating key topics in plant biology. An enjoyable and thought-provoking introduction to the topic of sexual reproduction in plants. Students observe in real time the growth of a pollen tube, over the course of a lesson. When a pollen...

This activity encourages children to consider how bones grow as we grow. Working in groups, children measure the height, distance around the skull, length of a foot and length of a lower arm for each person in order to investigate whether taller people have longer bones...

From LSIS, this case study describes work by Wirral Metropolitan College. A core focus of the LSIS STEM Programme is embedding and supporting whole organisation approaches to STEM provision across the learning and skills sector. Wirral Metropolitan College has demonstrated how a whole-organisation approach to STEM...

This Concept Cartoon on food was produced by Millgate House Education and Practical Action. This cartoon help students explore environmental issues around growing and importing food.

Concept Cartoons are quick, simple and effective. They are designed to intrigue, provoke discussion and stimulate thinking....

These diagnostic questions and response activities (contained in the zip file) support students in being able to:

• Recall that living organisms are made of cells.
• Distinguish between ‘getting bigger’ (an increase in size) and growth (an increase in the number of cells) in multicellular...

This resource is an interactive excel program to enable students to investigate exponential growth and decay. The topics of the interactive sheets are depreciation, exponential growth of bacteria and half life and radioactive decay.

This animation shows the processes of growth in plants at the cellular level. It demonstrates how growth occurs at specific regions within the plant, how cells divide by mitosis, and how cells become specialised into different tissues...

Guess Zoo is fun animal guessing game, produced by ARKive, that can be used to introduce or support several lesson themes, for example species diversity, adaptations, habitats and classification. Using a set of species cards, students have to work out what the animal on a card is by asking each other questions...

Two people are playing a guessing game. One of them thinks of a five letter word, and each time the other makes a guess they tell them the number of letters that they got correct. Can you figure out the correct word with just three guesses?

There are two further examples to try.

A simple and easily adaptable idea to introduce how algorithms work by allowing students to work out algorithms by a guessing game without the use of a computer. The activity is based on function machines that are used in mathematics at primary school but the level of difficulty can be amplified depending on what...

In this resource students are challenged to answer a mystery about colour.   They investigate the additive and subtractive synthesis of coloured pigments and explore what coloured objects look like under different coloured lights.
 

These materials, from the National Strategies, have been written to support a mathematics teacher in a mainstream classroom working with one or a number of students that are working at or below level three.

Students working at level three and below can access relatively sophisticated concepts and make links...

This paper, produced by the National Strategies, provides guidance on the teaching and learning of mental and written calculation. This is reinforced by the overall aim that when students leave primary school they:

• have a secure knowledge of number facts and a good understanding of the four operations;...

This paper, produced by the National Strategies, provides guidance, with examples, on how to strengthen children’s oral and mental skills. It includes vocabulary and a guide to use when identifying the purposes of oral and mental work.

At the time the National Numeracy Strategy was introduced, there was...