8 of the best KS3 maths resources for teaching scale factor enlargement
Make your students' understanding of ratio, proportion and rates of change improve tenfold with these activities, ideas and lesson plans
- by Teachwire
- Classroom expertise and free resources for teachers
1 | Transformations
For a good place to start, or for students to revisit, for some basic definitions, this BBC Bitesize page includes:
Or you can just check out the entire thing here.
2 | Scale factor revision
This video provides a neat overview to calculating scale factors.
Check out the video and accompanying notes here.
3 | Enlargement by a scale factor
For a more in-depth look this video walks students through the idea of enlarging a shape from a centre of enlargement.
4 | Find the centre of enlargement for a given shape
In this lesson, students are asked to decide where the centre of enlargement can go for a given shape with a scale factor of 3 enlargement so that no part of the image will go off the edge of the grid.
Solving this problem involves students in intelligent trial and error as they experiment with various possible centres of enlargement in order to locate the locus of possible positions.
Download this free Colin Foster lesson plan here.
5 | Growing rectangles
This NRICH activity gets students to consider scale factor enlargements for rectangles, before moving on to other 2D shapes, and then 3-dimensional ones.
Other scale factor activities include …Who is the fairest of them all? and Matter of Scale should students want more of a challenge.
First, give Growing Rectangles a go here.
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6 | Calculating scale factor
As the title of the video suggests, this is a short clip that shows students how to calculate the scale factor of two shapes. It’s a handy one to refer to should they need it.
Watch the video above, or find it here.
7 | Enlargement worksheets
If you’re after some printable worksheets, these ones from Mathster should do the trick. Not only are they free, but there’s a regular version and an advanced one too.
Print out the standard version here.
8 | Interactive worksheets
This handy site throws up 10 questions for students to answer on scale factor, and they can check their answers there and then.
Better yet, want more questions? Just hit the new worksheet button and it’ll provide you with 10 more.
Browse our maths question worksheets for Year 7, Year 8, Year 9 and GCSE maths. Download 100+ problem-solving questions in our KS3 maths worksheets pack from White Rose Maths.
