Continuing my work tutoring A level students, I have been writing some one page, A4 summaries of Mechanics 1 for the Edexcel M1 component. I have got the full course down to five pages.  These are not meant to be a complete, perfect summary of the course, simply an idea to prompt the memory and recall the key facts and processes.  As a result they are deliberately rough and ready, intended as a work in progress to be added to or scribbled out, highlighted or re-written.

When teaching full A level classes I used to employ a similar idea, but ask the students to prepare one topic each.  With larger classes it may be two students to one topic – which allowed for some collaborative effort, potentially productive in its own right.  The instructions were always that the sheet should not go beyond one page, enough copies had to be produced for the whole class and the student had to give a short summary to the class for 5-10 minutes to introduce their revision sheet.  It provided for a bit of fun, and the best sheets used to be added to the school’s Moodle site for reference by future year groups.

Examples are below for anyone to make use of as they wish.

Four forces:

Kinetics and projectiles:

All the best,

Steve Fearnley

Steve Fearnley, MA MEd PGCE, has been a maths teacher for over 30 years as well as being a deputy headteacher. He is now a private maths tutor, covering KS3 up to A Level, as well as an author for both MyMaths.co.uk and our brand new AQA GCSE Maths Student Books.