This problem solving activity has a number (all operations) focus.
Jennie the old sheep dog is lazing around in the paddock near the house.
She counts the number of animals in the paddock. There are 11 of them, pigs and ducks.
Then she counts the legs. She sees 28 legs.
How many ducks are there?
This problem uses the multiplication facts of 2 and 4. It also gives students the opportunity to combine the operations of addition and subtraction. As there are many ways to solve this problem it will be accessible to a range of students. You could adapt the context of this problem to focus around horses, and horse riders, or tricycles and bicycles.
Jennie the old sheep dog is lazing around in the paddock near the house. She counts the number of animals in the paddock. There are 11 of them, pigs and ducks. Then she counts the legs. She sees 28 legs.
How many ducks are there?
Get the students to write and solve their own problems by changing the numbers of animals and legs.
3 pigs, 8 ducks
If the first guess was 5 pigs and 6 ducks there are 32 legs. At this point the students should realise that to reduce the number of legs we have to reduce the number of pigs. Some students may be able to reason that when you reduce the pigs by one and add a duck you have reduced the number of legs by 2.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/pigs-and-ducks at 8:55pm on the 26th February 2024