Problem solving

Year 5 are well on their way to starting the new term, Miss Greaves has decided to start our maths lesson off with problem solving task. We looked at a range of skills needed to answer a range of problems. One of the tricky activities was to scale a recipe up and down. Trying to scale down a teaspoon of dried mustard was hard to understand at first. Miss Greaves used real life objects to help us understand what half a teaspoon would look like.

We also looked at cryptic clues to help work out the age of children. Can you answer one of our questions? Seth’s age is a multiply of 5 and is 3 more than a multiple of 4. However, he is younger than 30. How old is Seth? With these questions you have to think outside the box and use a range of skills to help answer. It’s great to get your mind thinking in different ways.

One challenge we all face is answering two-step problems. We can use our knowledge of add and subtract to answer simple questions, however as soon as there is more than one task to do we struggle. Miss Greaves said she is going to give us some more for homework.

Click here for more maths problems.