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.
There are three caves.
There are bears in each cave.
There are 12 bears altogether.
If there are 2 bears in the first cave, how many bears might be in each of the other caves?
Note to teacher: This activity requires materials for illustration. The ‘bears’ could be counters or buttons, the caves could be paper cups.
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students 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 use images and/or objects to represent the bears to be distributed. By changing the partitions of the ten they create a solution set of possible number pairs.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student uses symbolic representation of the possible number pairs and relates the pairs back to the bear context.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/bears-caves at 8:50pm on the 26th February 2024