Teach Primary Issue 19.6

This lesson, like many other reasoning activities I have developed over the years, was inspired by the book We CanWork It Out by Vickery and Spooner ( tinyurl.com/tp-WCWIO ) , which 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, spread them across a series of cards and set the children to work as your very own little maths detectives. 1 | SORT YOUR CARDS I always produce the cards for the children on a single A3 sheet. Not only does this make copying and preparation simple, as I’m not cutting out endless numbers of cards, it also means I don’t lose any before the lesson! From the moment pupils spot the cards, they’re rolling up their sleeves, eager to dive into the problem. First, ask pupils to read through all the cards, while still as one complete sheet, to find the question/goal card. Then get them to colour in this card, or mark it in some other way to make it stand out. In my experience, this can take an age for some children, but with repeated practice, my class are now adept at spotting the language ‘signposts’ of the question card. Next, get the children to cut up the sheet into individual cards. At this point, I always emphasise that I’m not concerned about the quality of the cutting as we’ll be recycling the cards at the end of the lesson; the outcome will be captured by the children in their books. This speeds up this stage and allows them to focus on what is on the cards. If, while working on a card, they spot a red herring (deliberately START HERE MAIN LESSON l How to identify the question or goal within a reasoning problem l How to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information l How to independently communicate a solution to a problem MATHS First, provide the children with 20 or so cards, each containing 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 card facts, or use AI (this will of course require fact-checking). If you’d like to use my insect-graph activity, you can download the cards and solution sheet at the link on the right. Transform any routine revision lesson into interactive and worthwhile reasoning skills development, with Marc Bowen KS2 LESSON PLAN aglanciwvcprimary.co.uk Clues, cards, and child-size Columbos... WHAT THEY’LL LEARN 102 | www.teachwire.net