The Number Factory

These sheets contain 3 end-of-term or last period, end-of-week activities. They are also something visible for the students to take home and all are a lot of fun.

1. I Know Your Number
   This is just a little fun activity that students cut out and show to their friends and family. The template can be photocopied onto normal paper or card. There is some mathematics involved with the placement of the numbers in the master card and the way the templates are designed, but overall it is best to leave that up to the better students to investigate and further develop in their own time.

2. Five Card Addition
   Although it only contains level 2 addition, with this exercise students have a lot of fun and will not realise the number of additions that they are actually performing. If they take the cards home and play the trick 10 times they are potentially completing 10 additions. Compare that with giving them 10 arithmetic sums for homework. How many would actually do these when they went home? The exercise is also a good introduction to BEMA (order of operations).

3. The Mind Reader
   Like the previous exercise this is a lot of fun for students but they are actually completing a lot of good addition for totals between 1 and 63. For example if the number 63 was chosen, the mind reader would have to add 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32. Therefore they should be practising some good numeracy strategies in each of the additions such as making 10s and adding in parts.