Problem Talk

Here's a maths activity focused on helping children to work out what to do when faced with a two-stage problem.

Working with thinking partners, each child has a problem slip and they take it in turns to read it out and discuss how it could be attacked; discussing what maths functions they need to apply in order to solve the problem. Importantly, they must also decide on the order of those functions and be prepared to explain everything to the rest of the class.

This is a very useful activity for either the introductory or plenary phase of a lesson with children working together on mini whiteboards. The maths problems could also be used as part of group activity. Naturally, the focus is on the 'mathematical talk' and the decisions the children make regarding the problem rather than on the actual "answer".

The suggested problems here could easily be adapted or enhanced. In a following session the children could be asked to create their own problems, using these as a template, but focussing on specific concepts: subtraction and percentages, for example.

The 6 page pdf file contains 30 two-step problmes. Here are three examples:

We are currently putting together a collection of differentiated problems - so call back if you would like to see more 'difficult' (or 'easier') problems.

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