Mathematics Problem Solving Day

We do maths every day at school but on one special day we wanted to prove that we could put our mathematical problem solving skills to use in a variety of ways.

Throughout the day teachers set challenges so that pupils could demonstrate that they knew which skills and knowledge they should use. The only requirements were that the activities were active and fun.

At the end of the day we gathered in the hall to share our work.

Here are some of the things we did during the day:

Reception	Using the theme of Nursery Rhymes the class built a wall for Humpty Dumpty, made jam tarts and thought about how best to carry water.
Year One	Children made Chocolate Crispy cakes for all the infant children, so had to work out how many they needed to make, how much of each ingredient they would need and how much it would cost.
Year Two	Children used their measuring skills to make cakes and thought about pattern in their Joseph's coat designs.
Year Three	Year Three based their work on sweets so that they could set up a sweet shop. The pupils linked their work with their class project on India.
Year Four	In Year Four pupils used their knowledge of co-ordinates and area to make treasure map games for their friends to play.
Year Five	In Year Five pupils made fruit salad and cakes using their knowledge of ratio, measure and profit.
Year Six	Year Six pupils aimed to make a profit for the school charity by making cakes and biscuits. They also made cocktails for their own enjoyment! The class linked their work with the work on Jamaica and the Caribbean.

You can read a full report about their work from Year Three below.

Maths Problem Solving Day (08.02.07)

Our topic is India so we decided to set up an Indian Sweet Mart for our problem solving day. We found a recipe for Diwali sweets. We had 2 versions. One was for 50 sweets and one was for 100 sweets so we had to double the quantities or multiply them by 4. We made a shopping list.

We realised that the ingredients came in tins and packets that might not have the exact quantity we needed. We worked out how many packets or tins of each ingredient we needed to buy and worked out how much would be left over.

Shopping list 3 packets desiccated coconut 1 packet icing sugar 2 tins condensed milk 4 large bars chocolate

We found out how much the shopping cost by looking at the receipt.

We weighed each ingredient carefully using scales marked in 5g. We had to work out a special way to weigh the condensed milk. We made the sweets by following the recipe.

We knew each batch had to make approximately 50 sweets. If we made the sweets too big there wouldn't be enough for everyone. We divided the mixture into fractions. We knew that we had to make 12 sweets from a quarter of the mixture or 6 sweets from an eighth.

We put the sweets on trays to set. In our groups, we estimated how many we had made. Then we arranged the sweets in an array to work out exactly how many we had made.

We needed to work out how many sweets the whole class had made. The arrays gave us multiplication sums which looked complicated but if you knew your 10x tables, you were OK.

We did a quick estimate of the total - around 400. The accurate answer was 394. We had made twice as many sweets as the recipe had said! What do you think had happened?

We worked out a price for each sweet by dividing the amount of money spent on ingredients by the number of sweets. We rounded the numbers to make the calculation easier. We worked out if we charged
We made up a price list with 'deals' if you wanted to buy more than one. 4p for each sweet we would cover the costs with some profit to go to charity.

4p for each sweet we would cover the costs with some profit to go to charity.

The final bit of the day was making packaging. We looked at lots of different nets and had to work out what shape they would be when made into a 3D shape.