- Sums are from the new Asian-style maths teaching techniques
- Many British schools are starting to weave them into their own lesson plans
- Aim to help kids develop reasoning and problem-solving skills
Do these five maths challenges fill you with dread or do they seem less scary than the ones you remember from your school days?
That’s because they are from the new Asian-style maths teaching techniques that many British schools are starting to weave into their own lesson plans.
The approach focuses on deepening subject understanding by using physical objects and pictures to explore traditional maths symbols, as well as spending more lesson time developing reasoning and problem-solving skills.
These particular examples are from the free full curriculum that Tes – a school resource body – for years 1-6 of primary school. So can you figure out the answers?
Can YOU solve these maths challenges for six-year-olds? A new collection of sums inspired by Asian-style teaching techniques claim to be surprisingly simple, so can you get them all right?
Puzzle two involves figuring out the value of the blue box in the pyramid
Tes has launched a collection of maths education resources to help more schools looking to use the Shanghai and Singapore approach.
Laura Beeson, Assistant Head Teacher at Primrose Hill Primary School in London said: ‘We are still on the start of our mastery journey. It is important that we don’t see the Shanghai approach as simply a method that we can pick up and use in our own school settings.
‘The differences both within our school systems and culture are vast. It is up to us as practitioners to look at the fundamental values of the approach and see how they can be implemented in our own UK school settings.
Puzzle 3 involves calculating the number of bugs in the first jar
Puzzle 4 asks six-year-olds to work out a simple fraction
In puzzle 5, children are asked to work out how many more sweets are in the second bag
‘As a school we have started by focusing on three of the main aspects of mastery teaching: taking slow steps and dedicating more time to concepts before moving on, the use of models and images to support understanding and the importance of variation – seeing the same concept in many different ways.
‘Finding resources that contain that variation of the same concept is one of the main barriers for our teachers. The Tes primary maths mastery space is a central place to look for this – giving teachers a starting point.’