Comment recorded on the 24 May 'Starter of the Day' page by Ruth Seward, Hagley Park Sports College:

"Find the starters wonderful; students enjoy them and often want to use the idea generated by the starter in other parts of the lesson. Keep up the good work"

Comment recorded on the 10 April 'Starter of the Day' page by Mike Sendrove, Salt Grammar School, UK.:

"A really useful set of resources - thanks. Is the collection available on CD? Are solutions available?"

Comment recorded on the 14 October 'Starter of the Day' page by Inger Kisby, Herts and Essex High School:

"Just a quick note to say that we use a lot of your starters. It is lovely to have so many different ideas to start a lesson with. Thank you very much and keep up the good work."

Game 1

A pupil stands with his or her back to the screen and the teacher selects a word (Click the button above)

Members of the class give clues so that the person with their back to the screen can guess the word

Game 2

If a large screen isn't available the teacher could select a word and a pupil could come up to the teacher's computer to read it.

This pupil then gives clues to the rest of the class to guess the word. Whoever guesses it first is the next to be the clue giver.

Game 3

Pupils are divided into two teams.

One member of each team stands with their backs to the screen and the teacher selects a word (Click the button above).

The two teams take turns giving their team member a clue to the mystery word. The first team member to guess the word wins a point for their team.

Game 4

Play as the party game "Charades". No talking allowed.

Game 5

A pupil stands with his or her back to the screen and the teacher selects a word (Click the button above)

The pupil asks the rest of the class questions which they can only answer "Yes" or "No". The pupil attempts to guess the word with the minimum number of questions.

E.g. "Is it a shape?"

"Have we seen this word recently?"

"Is the word associated with probability?"

"Does it have less than five letters?"

Game 6

Pupils could play the games suggested above in pairs if they have at least one computer, laptop, iPad or similar between them.

Word Difficulty

The categories of Easy, Medium and Hard need explaining. The previous version of this application had the facility for teachers to vote on each word that was randomly selected from our database of 559 mathematical words and phrases. The votes indicated how suitable the teachers thought the words were for this game.

After collecting over 85000 of these votes we have arbitrarily divided up the database in to three sections accordingly. You will probably find some words are not in the category that you would put them in so we suggest you just skip those words and go on to select another.