Friday 2nd November

Today we worked in groups of four and each group had a large place value grid on their table and lots of counters. On the interactive whiteboard was a game called ‘Number Strength’ which challenges the children with lots of different mental maths problems. Each group had to answer 5 mental addition questions, 5 subtraction, 5 multiplication, 5 division and a final round of 10 mixed questions. After each group of 5 or 10 questions, the teams were told how many seconds they took to answer the questions correctly. The teams then had to represent the number of seconds they took using their place value grids and their counters. After each round they completed, they had to add on the seconds they took to complete that round to their overall total. This meant moving counters on the place value grid and crossing over from units to tens and tens to hundreds. Once all five rounds had been completed by each team, then the team which the smallest overall total of seconds were the winners.