Using games to help with reasoning

Monday 26th September

Using games to help with reasoning

Great to see lots of reasoning today whilst children were 'playing' games that involved using mental subtraction strategies that had been explicitly taught last week.

For 'Strike It Out' it was interesting to see Kamilla using the strategy of thinking about the outcome of the difference between her two numbers before committing to her answer. 

Nour, who had been trying to use a written formal method for 'mental' subtraction last week could now see that counting up as an effective method last week, was able to use this when she was finding the greatest difference between 2 out of 3 of her playing cards. 

After about 5 minutes of staring at a number fact family, Kimberly was able to see that by changing numbers around you can create 4 different number statements using 3 numbers (add/subtract only). 

Playing games with maths has become a regular Monday morning session and the discussion of maths and the language that was being used - 'I have the biggest difference', 'oh, I can change the numbers around and make...' is proving to be a great insight into their understanding of numbers.