Making staircases beyond "ten"

Our number system works with tens, and the way of showing teens numbers above is a great way of showing how they work.

But there's lots of other ways of making those numbers. We explored this by making bigger staircases. So many different ways!

Here is a link to the album of photos.

Cuisenaire equations on the new ipads

We've got twelve new ipads in K3! We used them and the Brainingcamp Cuisenaire app to create some Cuisenaire rod equations:

We all took turns having a go. Here is some of our work (see full album):

Squares of Cuisenaire rods

We've been experimenting with filling square trays with Cuisenaire rods in different ways. There are so many interesting ways to do this, and it's great for getting to know the lengths of the different rods too!

Cuisenaire rods - writing equations

We are beginning to write down some of what we've made with the Cuisenaire rods.

To do this we're using the equals sign = and the plus sign +. As here, in 'Make a Face':

This week we used this interactive page - https://nrich.maths.org/2724 - to talk about which red/white trains can be made to have the same length as the yellow rod. (You might like to have a go at home!) We also talked about how to write down what we'd found.

Of course, we had a go at this with the real rods, and had a go at writing down what we'd made.

Cuisenaire Rods

This week the children were introduced to the mathematical resource of Cuisenaire rods. They were asked to construct whatever they desired and then to explain their work to the class.

See an album of images here.

Investigating 16 with Cuisenaire rods

After a long time exploring Cuisenaire rods using their colour letter names, we're now doing the same using the numbers, (for the moment) counting the white as 1, the red as 2, and so on.

We've been looking at ways of making the number 16:

Have a look at a slideshow of our work in class. Or see it as a movie:

We've been writing down the equations we've created:

Thanks also to BT who inspired us with some 16 work she did at home:

Daniel's Cuisenaire rod exploration at home

We use Cuisenaire rods lots in K3 as you know. It may be something you'd like to play with at home; they're available via for instance amazon, and we can recommend these wooden ones, made in Spain, as good value. And/or you may like your child to try one of the online Cuisenaire environments that we use at school. If you make anything, do take a photo or screengrab, and send it to us!

Daniel's got his own set and he's been busy creating equal-length trains, and writing equations to describe them:

 

For Jacob's trains

for Edouard's trains

for Marcos' trains

Tjan

Tjan's trains have just been added to the blog. What could you write for this?

Gabriel

How to write this?