Key stage 3 teachers just getting to grips with the numeracy strategy’s three-stage lesson will welcome the “Starters” books from Badger Publishing and OUP which focus on the oral and mental starter stage.

The Badger book presents 102 clearly laid-out, five- to 10-minute, scripted starter sessions for Year 7 covering a range of Framework objectives. The approach is in line with the strategy recommendations - open ended with lots of “What if...?”, “Why...” and “How did you...?” probing questions. There are “challenges” for more able pupils and - assuming that the main teaching activity is related to the starter - there are suggested links to the plenary session.

Hundreds of starter activities are suggested in the Oxford University Press pack, but numeracy strategy-wise, it is less on the ball. Each starter is basically a description of a stand-alone class, group or individual activity such as bingo, snap or “odd one out” with photocopiable resources. All useful practice activities, but hardly constituting the brisk cut and thrust of pupil-teacher interaction advocated in the Framework.

The Framework for Years 7 to 9 emphasises the importance of the graphical calculator in students’ learning. 30 Calculator Lessons for Key Stage 3 provides detailed lesson notes for using such a calculator (specifically the Texas Instruments TI-83 or TI-83 Plus) in a range of maths topics.

Lessons are in the Framework’s three-stage format and there are lots of suggestions for discussion and open-ended questions. All lessons require a viewscreen unit for projecting an image of a calculator display and some require link cables for connecting calculators to each other or to a computer.

With the inclusion of “block graph” and the aide-memoire “2D is flat, 3D is fat”, the Key Stage 3 A-Z Maths Handbook could be recommended for KS2 - if it did not have so many errors. A parallelogram illustrates the definition of “trapezium”. The vertex in a 3-D shape is described as the point at which two faces (rather than three) meet. And a rhombus is erroneously described as a shape with two pairs of equal sides. I could go on.

Paul Harrison is a mathematics writer