Reasoning Puzzles

As part of my work on math Literacy, I am aiming to have my students work together more in partners or groups of three. Hopefully, this will facilitate more Math Talk. This week we worked on Reasoning Puzzles. I found these fantastic puzzles here at Teachers Pay Teachers.  I originally found them through her fantastic blog- Beyond Traditional Math.  (Take a look around her blog, you wont be disappointed!) It was great to be able to walk around the room and hear all the talk going on. "What is a digit?", "Which one is the hundreds box?" and  "How come you are putting that one there?" are just a few of the questions I heard.

The students were given two sheets, one that just said True/False and then the other with an equation with empty boxes in it and then facts down below. Together with their partners they had to figure out what numbers went in the boxes and then read the facts below. They cut up the facts and placed them in the appropriate columns.

 One thing that became apparent to me was that I had not left enough time for a debrief at the end of the lesson. i am going to include that in next time. Over my years of teaching, I have become a firm firm believer in repeating similar style lessons or activities. The first time that you introduce a new idea, it is foreign to students, the language may be new and how to approach the activity will be intimidating to them. I plan to spend a few days per month working on these puzzles together with our compass buddies.  Some students were puzzled by some of the statements and had a hard time deciding which ones were true or false. Others seemed to approach very methodically and used a process of elimination.

Next time, I think I will just give them one set of sheets between them. this first time, I gave each person their own sets of facts and true/false sheets. This was a good way for everyone to start out knowing how to cut up the pieces and place them in the two columns. Hopefully on the second time with there just being one sheet between them, it will encourage even more talk.