Sum Steps: 'Start the Day' reasoning addition problems

Do your children need practice solving problems and puzzles? Do you need activities that specifically practise reasoning with addition and subtraction? 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 encourage children to work systematically to find the correct totals of each step in the pyramid. Children will be able to find some spaces as a direct result of some of the known numbers, with only one number in the bottom row remaining unknown.

Children might choose to use a trial and improvement method for finding this unknown number, reasoning out their others answers based on their choices. Otherwise, children might use algebra to replace this unknown number with x. The answer pages provide both the full answer, and the stages involved in using algebra to enable teacher follow up during plenary or mini-plenary discussions.

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. For example, what piece of information helps us the most. Can we start from there? Why can’t a 5 go here? Etc;
• Encourage children to think about what they did to make the problem smaller;
• Ask children how they could adapt the puzzle to make it easier, or more challenging (for example through fewer clues, or fewer pyramid steps);
• Use one activity per week over a half term to encourage regular revisiting of the content (addition and subtraction) and strategies (working backwards/trial and improvement/algebra);
• Have children create their own versions and send them to us to challenge our followers - Twitter: @UKExceED