Challenging pupils in primary maths

Ensure your primary learners reach their full potential with this collection of mathematical extension resources

Looking for ways to stretch and engage your students while encouraging independent thinking and practising essential skills? Then, look no further! This hand-picked selection of stimulating lesson ideas, activities and exercises is ideal for pushing your pupils in imaginative ways.

Lesson ideas

• Solar system time zones
  Encourage pupils to calculate a daily schedule for six planets by adding or subtracting a given amount of hours and minutes from Earth time.
• Design-a-zoo challenge*
  Set learners the task of creating a brand new zoo by analysing costs and profit based on the amount of space required by different animals.
• Footballers’ pay activity
  Try these worksheets to get students reading, ordering and solving problems using numbers greater than one million in a real-life context.
• End-of-topic data tasks 
  Wrap up a unit on collecting and representing data with this series of challenging questions, covering bar charts, pictograms and more. 

Activities and tasks

• Ratio and proportion extension
  Encourage learners to express groups of items using ratio and proportion before creating their own questions for their peers to solve.
• Angle problems
  Stretch pupils’ reasoning skills, as well as their understanding of angles in polygons, with these thought-provoking worksheets, including answers.
• Negative numbers activity
  Combining PSHE and maths, this fictional bank statement is an great starting point for getting students to explore negative numbers.
• Independent algebra task
  Dig deeper into the concept of algebra by asking older learners to write algebraic expressions for a range of problems and situations.

Quick links

*This resource is being sold by its author

For even more inspiration, why not check out our collection of quality assured resources centred around the mastery approach to teaching primary maths?