Maths is play- Creating the worst mental strategy!

Maths is play is our underlining theme this week.

It's an important concept for children to understand and appreciate about maths.

Maths is about playing.  We play with numbers, shapes etc to find patterns or connections.

Mathematical thinking is also creative thinking. 

To help us understand this a bit more and to tie in with our enquiries into multiplication strategies, we were presented with this question:

We had a minute or so to write down the best strategy we could think of and then we were invited to share with the class.  Here were some of our thoughts:

After we shared and explained our mental strategies, we voted on which we felt is the easiest to do mentally.  

We had a tie:

      

To play with numbers, we then changed the question to the WORST mental strategy:

Either individually, in partners or trios the kids had an amazingly fun time trying to create the most complex, maddest, brain-popping way to mentally calculate.

Play with the numbers was the simple instruction.

It's an interesting word to use- play.

It relaxes the mind to enjoy.

The discussions we were having with each other were rich in number understandings. Odd-even, decimals, square roots place values etc were being heard amongst the excited chatter.

We were all beaming with pride of how incredibly complex they were able to play with the numbers.


We published our strategy and gave it a name.  We used these to teach each other how it worked.  

Some really CREATIVE mathematical thinking took place:

         

      

        

        

Slowly, but surely we are finding out how maths is about playing......