Transform any routine revision lesson into an interactive and worthwhile maths reasoning skills development session with Marc Bowen’s lesson plan…
I was inspired by the book We Can Work It Out by Vickery and Spooner for this lesson, like many other reasoning activities I have developed over the years.
It takes potentially mundane maths problem-solving and reasoning activities and transforms them into captivating investigations worthy of Columbo or Jessica Fletcher (dating myself there!).
The premise is simple: take any contextualised problem, break it down into individual clues or facts, throw in a few red herrings and spread them across a series of cards. Then set children to work as your very own little maths detectives.
Maths reasoning learning objectives
- Identify the question or goal within a maths reasoning problem
- Differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information
- Independently communicate a solution to a problem
Starter activity
First, provide the children with 20 or so cards. Each will contain either a contextual fact, or a piece of useful information to help solve the problem at hand.
You’ll also want to include a couple of red herrings, and of course the goal, or question, for the task.
For example, I wanted to revisit children’s bar graph skills, and decided on a context of insects, to correlate with our science topic.
Our goal was to ‘construct a bar graph of the insects found within the school grounds’. Some cards included ‘7 ladybirds were found near the pond’, and ‘Fewer wasps were found than any other type of insect’.
You can either write your own fact cards or use AI (this will of course require fact-checking). If you’d like to use my insect-graph activity, they are included in this download.
Marc Bowen is a deputy head and primary teacher in South Wales.
