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Welcome to another month of puzzles, challenges and investigations. I hope you have recovered from Halloween and your pupils weren’t too scared by the 31st October Starter!
Let’s begin with the puzzle for this month. It’s about two chaps called Ant and Dec (how likely is that?)
Ant is thinking of a number which is either 1, 2 or 3. What one question could Dec ask him to find out what number he is thinking of if Ant can only answer either yes, no or I don't know?
I think you will need some thinking time to figure that one out. The answer is at the bottom of this newsletter after a round up of the new items on the Transum website.
First to be mentioned is Hot Number Challenges. This is a new Shine + Write resource designed to be projected in front of a class of pupils who each have ten cards numbers nought to nine. Keep the variety in Maths lessons by doing something like this once in a while. The challenges are increasing order of difficulty and are suitable for upper Primary up to those Year 12 students who really need a reminder of the properties of numbers.
Now that knowledge of Roman numerals is specifically mentioned in the English National Curriculum you are no doubt looking for resources to teach and reinforce the structure of the system. The Roman Numerals Jigsaw is just what you have been looking for. It’s an interesting challenge that makes the learning a little different. There is also a more traditional quiz to go with it that contains a number of different levels matching the National Curriculum.
Sneakily reusing the code that made the jigsaw mentioned above work it was quite easy to produce more traditional Number Jigsaws and a Tetromino/Pentomino challenge.
Continuing to fill the gaps the Mileometer quiz tests the ability to convert between miles and kilometres. The twelve questions are arranged in increasing order of difficulty with quite a challenge at the end.
The latest activity, which only went live at the weekend, is Venn Paint. This is clearly aimed at the older student who needs practice recognising intersections, unions and complements on two and three set Venn diagrams.
Finally it might be worth reminding you that there are hundreds of exam style questions available on the site and you, as a Transum Subscriber, get access to the worked solutions. Many of the questions have been adapted from the new GCSE(9-1) specimen papers which were published recently.
The answer to this month’s puzzle is "I'm thinking of either one or two. Is the number that you are thinking of larger than mine?"
If Ant answers Yes he is thinking of 3
If Ant answers No he is thinking of 1
If Ant answers I don't know he is thinking of 2
Enjoy November
John
PS. Why did all the metres run from the 1000m race?
They were scared of the killer metre at the end.
Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback on this newsletter and the resources on this website so that they can be made even more useful for those learning Mathematics anywhere in the world. Click here to enter your comments.
