The purpose of this activity is to engage students in problem solving to find an unknown addend.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A class of 25 students are sharing a basket of fruit. There is exactly one piece of fruit for each student.
In the basket are:
How many oranges are in the basket?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow ākonga time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that for now you want ākonga to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow ākonga time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow ākonga time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student is provided with a 5 x 5 grid and uses physical objects to represent the different fruit. They count the missing spaces to find the unknown number.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student creates a physical model to represent the number of fruits and counts on the find the missing number of oranges.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/shared-fruit at 4:25am on the 29th April 2024