The purpose of this activity is to engage students in using counting strategies, images and/or materials to solve a problem.
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.
A school has three football fields.
At lunchtime, there is a five-a-side football game on each of the fields.
Two of the teams are made up of year one students and the others are all year two students.
How many of the players on the fields are year two students?
Note: Five-a-side means five players on each team. There are no subs.
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow ākonga time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that for now you want ākonga to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow ākonga time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow ākonga 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 creates a diagram of the three fields with two teams of five on each field. They eliminate the Year One players and are left with the Year 2 players. They count to find there are 20 year 2 players.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student creates a diagram with numbers to represent the teams. They cross out two teams then find the number of remaining players by counting in fives.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/games-all-fields at 8:50pm on the 26th February 2024