Flags Inquiry

I love this flags inquiry for digging into area and perimeter. The biggest challenge set was: Can I draw a different design with the same ratio of pink to yellow?

2D shape prompt

I slightly adapted this prompt for my grade 4 class by removing one of the shapes. The questions and comments generated kept us busy for a couple of weeks and by the end of the inquiry pretty much all the required benchmarks, and more, were ticked off.

Area Prompt

This inquiry prompt lends itself to be being used in a  number of different ways. The first time I used this prompt I used both images and the statement. The second time I just presented one image. The first kept the inquiry focused on area - the second left the inquiry far more open but eventually came …

Provocation for area inquiry

What do you do when a prompt or provocation doesn't take the learning anywhere new? We are coming to the end of our current unit exploring 2D shape and space. There has been some powerful inquiry driven by the students through carefully chosen prompts and provocations. However, none of them have led us to digging deeper into the concept …

Exploring Tessellation

I love it when students find different ways of exploring and demonstrating their understandings. Our benchmarks for tessellation are: create and record tessellating designs by reflecting, translating and rotating common shapes identify shapes that do and do not tessellate I left it open for the students to find ways to explore the concept of tessellation. As always, …

Which One Doesn’t Belong?

I feel like I'm quite late to the #WODB party. I've been using number talks and fraction talks for a while now and have really noticed the impact they have have on the students' abilities to reason and justify their thinking whilst using mathematical language with precision. So it was great to discover a new way to get the students thinking, reasoning, talking etc. We have been …

Rectangle Inquiry

Today I introduced a small group of my students to 'prompts'. We talked about the idea of them asking the questions. What do they want to know more about? What is interesting or confusing? My go-to site for prompts is Andrew Blair's inquirymaths.com. Here's how it went: pairs were given 10 mins with the prompt …

A Textbook Problem

Casualty of last year's library cull was this pile of rather out-dated looking textbooks from 1998. It was assumed that these were fit for the recycling bin. Words like textbook, levels and National Curriculum don't easily fit with PYP philosophy or the direction I have been trying to take my Maths teaching. A cursory flick through the …