The purpose of this activity is to engage students in logical thinking and simple addition and subtraction.
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.
Ari, Ben, Cam, Dan and Eva are counting their card collections.
Ari has 21 cards. Cam has 2 more than Ari. Ben has 3 fewer than Cam and 1 more than Dan who has 3 fewer than Eva.
How many cards does Eva have?
Put the children’s names in order from the person with the fewest cards to the person with the most.
Note to teacher: This activity requires materials for illustration. Playing cards could be used, or could be represented by counting materials such as counters.
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 uses a physical model (playing cards) to make collections for each person in the problem.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student uses addition and subtraction equations to find the number of cards for each person in the problem.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/card-collections at 8:50pm on the 26th February 2024