Maths Thinking Groups

One day each week our students work in their 'thinking groups' which are made up of students with varying stages in Maths. Our question today was:

Miss Breen had to bake a lot of cupcakes for the SPCA's cupcake fundraiser. She made five batches of pink cupcakes, two batches of blue cupcakes and three batches of green cupcakes. there were 12 cupcakes in each batch. How many cupcakes did she bake?

To begin with Miss Breen had to explain what a batch was! It is very important for our tamariki to learn Maths related vocabulary and well as numbers and strategies!

Each group worked through the answer together then shared back to the rest of the class. We have shown you how each stage answers the same question. If your child is stage 4, 5 or 6 you can see the development of thinking and use of strategies.

Stage 4: We needed to draw the groups of twelve to help us work out how many we had altogether. When we got our answers, we added them together by counting on to give us our cupcake total!

 Stage 5: We used our addition to work out the answer. We worked out how many batches there were altogether then added the number of cupcakes inn each batch. We could do this by adding in twelves or we could use our knowledge of Place Value and add in tens first then add the ones to get our total of 120.

Stage 6:  We use our multiplication and addition facts to work out how many cupcakes! We must know our multiplication facts in order to use this strategy!