Magic maths

To start the day we read a book called 'One Hundred Hungry Ants'. In the story the ants start off  marching in one long line of 100 to get to some yummy picnic food. One ant, however, thinks this is going to take far too long. He suggests marching in 2 rows of 50, then 4 rows of 25, 5 rows of 20 and finally 10 rows of 10. With all the changing about the ants end up missing all the food!

Today Year 3 have had lots more fun exploring maths.

We wanted to find out if the ant was right to suggest changing the rows so we did our own investigation in PE. The children suggested different arrays that we could march in and we then timed how long it took to get across the playground.

There were 30 children in the class today. 

Can you think of the arrays we might have tried?

Which one do you think was the quickest?

Our Roman army training from last term helped us keep in our lines!

 For the rest of the morning we were treated to a magical maths show. Barney, the Mathemagician, impressed everyone with lots of clever facts and tricks to do with maths.  

We were told a story which involved making lots of different numbers.

The story even involved making fractions.

Next, Barney really impressed the children with his ability to work out any 6 questions involving x 99 or x 11 in under 30 seconds. 

Luckily, Barney showed everyone his magic way of solving the problems so that the children can impress friends and family with their own super speedy maths. 

Can you work out the following questions in under 1 minute?

99 x 65 =                                11 x 96 =

99 x 74 =                                11 x 59 =

99 x 81 =                                11 x 48 =

99 x 94 =                                11 x 96 =

9 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = ?

Barney also showed us how we can use our number bonds to add numbers really quickly.

Can you use your number bonds to solve this puzzle?

In the afternoon we tackled another problem, which involved using our times tables skills and knowledge of arrays. 

Mr Smudge makes fudge and he sells them in boxes of 12, 24 or 36. 

He wants to pack them in cuboid shape boxes. 

How many different ways can he arrange the cubes of fudge so they 

will fit in cuboid shaped boxes?

We used multilink to try out different ideas. Then, we recorded our ideas as number sentences. 

How would you describe this array using a multiplication sentence?

It was tricky at times, but the class did a really good of preserving and using their times tables facts to help work out possible answers.