I have written a few posts about the Mastering Mathematics series that we started using this year (at the start my daughter’s Year 9) and it is honestly such a brilliant series, that I am writing another post. And NO this is not a paid for post or a post that is linked to the publishers in any way this is a happy home educator post, thrilled that we found a Maths series that in 9 months has just lifted my daughter’s confidence, improved her understanding and truly set her up for her IGCSE Maths. I can honestly say that for her IGCSE subjects – Maths is one of the subjects that I am not worried about because I know we have a good foundation, I know we have gotten into good practices and as long as we keep on, in this manner we are going to be absolutely fine, more than fine.

I really feel that by the end of Year 8 she was not happy with her Maths, she was doubting her ability and less than a year later she is cruising through, she is confident, she knows that she is getting it (and she is getting it). I do have to give her lots of credit, she is a hard worker and she has really tried, she reads every explanation, every worked example and then she works through all the practice examples in the text book and the practice book (for a detailed explanation about the practice books please read this post – year 9 practice books). She really does put the effort in and she never complains. So credit to her. She has done an amazing job, I am incredibly proud of her.

But I do want to speak about this range and why I think it has worked so well for us and why I am going to be using it with my son when he starts Year 7 in September.

They break the topics down into sub-sections and then for every sub-section you have a clear (and I do mean clear) explanation followed by worked examples. These worked examples are gold because it just takes that explanation, puts it into context and shows the user how to apply it.

After that you get practice questions broken down into three bands, with every band the questions do get harder. And yes we do all the bands. We start with the easy questions, make sure we are getting the basics, then we do band two and after band two we move to the questions in the practice book and then come back and do band three questions (band three questions are the hardest). And I must stress all the answers for all the questions are free to download from the website. So I printed all the answers out and once she has worked through a set of questions, she marks them herself.

It works, it has really worked for us. We started at the beginning of Book 3 and we have worked through chapter by chapter, reading everything, discussing when we need to and then doing the practice questions. And over the months that she has been working through this book her Maths has gone from a not very confident subject to a subject where she is cruising and often actually ends up doing extra questions just because she worked through her planned Maths so quickly and well, why-not?

I really do believe this series was exactly what she needed and I am so impressed with how her confidence in Maths has soared by just using their series for 9 months.

We really do Highly recommend this Maths series.

Edit – Just to add the series is split into 3 levels the thinking being – Book 1 would be used for Year 7, Book 2 would be used for year 8 and Book 3 would be Year 9 – just wanted to clarify that as someone already asked. This post talks about book 3 because we only started using the series in my daughter’s year 9.