5 reasons why you should look at our new best seller catalogue!

1.      Our brilliant books are written by brilliant teachers. They know what will inspire, motivate and challenge pupils and keep them engaged in their learning.

2.      Our easy to use resources help teachers to plan and deliver stress-free lessons across the curriculum. They are designed to supplement existing schemes, giving extra support to dip into as required.

3.      Our best-selling titles are linked to the National Curriculum programmes of study. Subjects covered include English and maths as well as foundation subjects such as foreign languages, PE and art.

4.      Our resources are flexible and can be adapted to suit a range of situations, whether this is children sitting in rows, limited sharing of equipment or even unexpected school closures. Our reproducible worksheets are ideal both for individual work in the classroom and for inclusion in home-learning packs.

5.      As an added bonus, you can save 20% on any orders you place, simply by quoting discount code C2020.

When you place an order, don’t forget to use the 20% discount code C2020 at the checkout. The code is valid until 31^st October 2020 and excludes p&p. You can order via our secure website: www.brilliantpublications.co.uk, by email (orders@tradecounter.co.uk), by ‘phone (01449 766629) or by fax (01449 767122).

FREE Creative Homework Tasks for Year 5 and Year 6

Follow this link to get a FREE 84-page e-book, Creative Homework Tasks for 9-11 Year Olds.

The activities are ideal for English or maths homework as they reinforce literacy and numeracy skills. The tasks link to other subject areas including science and technology, art and design and PSHE

But more than that, the imaginative, open-ended activities are sure to spark enthusiasm.

The tasks have been designed so that they can be given out with little or no input from the teacher if need be.

FREE Creative Homework Tasks

Follow this link to get a FREE 84-page e-book, Creative Homework Tasks for 7-9 Year Olds.

The activities are ideal for English or maths homework as they reinforce literacy and numeracy skills. The tasks link to other subject areas including science and technology, art and design and PSHE

But more than that, the imaginative, open-ended activities are sure to spark enthusiasm.

The tasks have been designed so that they can be given out with little or no input from the teacher if need be.

Can your pupils help us to solve some of our problems?

Urgent Appeal

We have an abundance of problems, so many in fact that we have three entire books full of them and desperately need your primary school pupils to help us to solve them!

Multiplication strategies

They are problems of a mathematical nature which is why we are contacting you as we think you will be the best person for the job. Your responsibilities will involve managing a young team of investigators, working out which pupils are best suited to solving each of the problems based on their level and ability.

We understand that you have a curriculum to teach, so we have only included the problems which are relevant to this and have left out problems regarding our fence that got blown down a couple of months ago by Storm Callum (a very inconsiderate man if you ask me) and how to get our rabbit to stop eating our shoes. I suppose we will have to solve these problems ourselves.

For more information on problems to challenge your pupils or to order the Maths Problems and Investigations Series for £45, simply visit: www.brilliantpublications.co.uk/book/maths-problems-and-investigations-for-primary-schools-428

There are two maths: one is better

What is the most effective way of giving KS2 pupils an understanding of how maths actually works?

There is no doubt that the rote learning of times tables is helpful to most pupils. But for progress to be made beyond that point children also need to understand the meanings behind mathematical problems.

Perhaps the most effective way of encouraging children to think about such issue is to give them maths problems that need them to use their knowledge of the four basic functions to solve simple problems.

Of course this can be done through the classic, “A man goes to a shop three times and buys four items each time…” type of question. But before children are ready to enter into those conundrums, they need to be able to solve the maths problems in purely mathematical terms, without any words in the way.

And the most effective way of doing this is through missing digit puzzles in which the mathematical question is set out with one part of the problem missing.

Thus they can be presented with an additional problem in which part of the answer is written in, and one of the two numbers to be added together. They have to work out what is missing.

Later they can be asked for a number in the eight times table where the first number is between 1 and 6 and the last number is six.

The big benefit with this approach is that because the questions are presented as puzzles to be solved rather than maths to be learned, they are much more stimulating and attractive to most KS2 children – and they really do help the children progress towards a mastery of mathematics’ basic functions.

You can see examples of how this works on our website at: Missing digit puzzles for times tables

And there is more information about the book and its contents here.

You can order Missing Digit Puzzles on our website either as a PDF for £10.99 or as a hardcopy book for £16.50. There is also the option to buy the hardcopy and PDF together at a discounted price of £19.80.