Odd One Out: 'Start the Day' reasoning activity

Do your children need practice solving problems and puzzles? Do you need activities that specifically practise reasoning about the properties of numbers? Then look no further than this ‘Start the Day’ activity pack.

This is the full pack which has 5 similar activities (each with teacher answers) in PDF and PowerPoint form for easy printing and sharing with your children on an interactive whiteboard.

The activity is designed to help children master properties of number, including (but not limited to):

• Recognising the multiples and factors of different numbers;
• Identifying similarities between numbers, such as number of tens and ones, place holders, odds and evens etc;
• Recognising prime, square, triangular and cube numbers;
• Considering more obscure areas of mathematics (Fibonacci sequence, mathematical language such as dozen, century etc).

Note: Any of the numbers presented could be the ‘Odd One Out’. The purpose of this activity is to encourage children to think of as many reasons for this choice, and justifying their decisions.

The answer pages provide some reasons to allow teacher and pupil discussion during the plenary.

Tips on how to deliver these activities:

• On the first occasion you use these activities, allow children a free run at solving the puzzle, perhaps with some very minor discussion around the known numbers and how they might help;
• Allow children to talk through their strategies for finding solutions, encouraging pupil voice in both paired and whole-class discussions;
• If necessary (some children won’t find a way to solve the problem without a system), share a way to work backwards. How many of the numbers are odd/even? How many of them can be divided by 6? Etc;
• Encourage children to think about what they did to make the problem smaller;
• Ask children how they could adapt the problem to make it easier, or more challenging (for example through using more numbers in the set, or through forcing a key rule (e.g. the odd one out must be because of its factors);
• Use one activity per week over a half term to encourage regular revisiting of the content (justifying the ‘Odd One Out’) and strategies (working backwards/trial and improvement);
• Have children create their own versions and send them to us to challenge our followers - Twitter: @UKExceED