Math News

At Grovedale West PS our whole school Maths teaching program includes a balance of explicit instruction, game based learning, open ended or ‘challenging' problem solving tasks. This balanced approach enables students to help develop important numeracy proficiency skills of understanding, reasoning and problem solving. It also gives students a chance to apply their maths skills to authentic problems and everyday life situations. Mr Ramage is currently working with the Year 1 teaching team to co-deliver some open ended challenges to our Year 1 students. This week the students in 1K were posed the question ‘I saw 18 wheels in the IGA carpark - if there were motorbikes, trikes or cars, how many different vehicles might there have been in the car park?  Can you find more than one possible answer?.' Students were encouraged to use concrete materials (such as blocks), together with drawings, symbols and numbers to work like ‘Mathematicians’ to represent their vehicles and form their different answers. There was some amazing work undertaken by the students who found multiple different answers and used different strategies in their problem solving. The session also included some interesting discussions about odd and even numbers. Here are a few examples of the students work and solutions to the problems.

The Year 1 team