Three weeks in and I can already say I am loving our new Maths Books. They just make Year 9 Maths easy (by easy I mean easy to understand). We have had a crazy first 3 weeks and the next 3 weeks are going to be just as crazy (I hurt my knee and we are moving house) but my daughter’s Maths is the one thing that is not stressing me (and her) out. No prep work required (okay I do read ahead the week before just to make sure I am happy with any explaining or help that I may need to give but that is it). I tell her which pages she needs to work through, she does the work, checks her answers (I have already printed out the FREE to download answers for her) and then if there are any questions she asks and we work through that together. No fuss at all. No me, spending ages on the internet searching for resources. It is all there, in our two books, nothing extra required. Just what we needed. (admission – I wish we had switched to this last year).

And my daughter after three weeks what are her thoughts – she likes all the worked examples that they include in the book and she likes that the questions are in bands which gradually get harder.

She also likes being able to mark her own work and see if she can figure out any errors that she made.

The only thing I think we are going to change/ add is the Practice Book that we are using. We currently have the Develop and Secure Practice Book 3 and she is breezing through it so I think we are going to get her the Extend Practice Book 3 to use.

In terms of content and what they cover. At the moment we are working through the first two chapters (Chp 1 – Powers and Indices, Chp 2 – Fractions) and then we are going to go onto Chapter 3 (Accuracy). For us the first few chapters just seemed like the logical place to start so we are following the books order. But after that I am not sure if I still stick with their order or jump around a bit, just because it makes sense to cover certain Maths sections as they link into our Science. But looking at the content you can do that, you can follow their suggested order or you can change and do chapters in a slightly different order if that suits you better.

In terms of examples given – so far I have NOT felt the need to print off extra examples for us to use. I have also NOT felt the need to find different explanations (which is something I have had to do it the past). However I personally think that using the Practice Book together with the Main student Book is a must. I am a big believer in Maths practice so I like having the extra questions in the practice book (I think it is really worth the £6.99 for all the questions you get).

It is still early days and there is still a lot of content which we need to work through, so I will write update posts during the year. But so far this is a Massive winner, my daughter is happy working through it and I am not having to spend extra time looking for worksheets for her or trying to find well-worded explanations (so for me it is a great time saving set).

For those of you looking for links for the Maths books we are using here they are.

Direct from the Hodder site – Mastering Mathematics Book 3

Develop and Secure Practice Book 3

Extend Practice Book 3

From Amazon

Key Stage 3 Mastering Mathematics Book 3

Key Stage 3 Mastering Mathematics Develop and Secure Practice Book 3

Key Stage 3 Mastering Mathematics Extend Practice Book 3

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