Session 4/3 evaluation

 It came to me about an hour before the session and proved to be a really useful resource for working with a hundred square. I could see it being used for all kinds of number square investigations.
The basis for this week's exploration was understanding how the multiples of certain primes are distributed over the hundred square.  As has become a feature of this programme, I wonder how much meaning explorers are able to fix onto maths like this. Nevertheless, we are committed to providing experiences that allow children to explore ideas in as many ways as possible.
We started with colour coded cards and wanted to see if our explorers could break the code.  Those who were there succeeded in saying lots of things about the possible links with colours and numbers.  Many noticed times tables and combined times tables.
We discussed prime numbers and what I called friendly primes. From that we worked on colouring a 100 square using the same code.  This is a way to start explorers seeing the patterns.  I should have started with 11 with this one though as many of them got the idea from the 2 times table that they all just go down.  and without any more thought proceeded to colour the numbers in, in columns (rather than the diagonal line of squares.
This was on top of the templates that revealed the answers if help was needed.
This session was also an opportunity to get to know some of the boys a bit more.  One of them had been asked to try colouring in the 2 times table.  He just said that he didn't want to do it.  His mum checked in with him and told me that he didn't know his two times table.  This was a bit of a revelation (as he is very able mathematically) but now I think back, I have excused playing up as boredom rather than inability.  This will be an important aspect of the sessions to master.  When to offer support. I imagine it will be whenever someone doesn't want to do an activity.  It works very differently with others of course.

 We had quite a good game to finish up.  We started with all the colour code cards colour down.  I threw the 2, 3, 5 and 11 cards up and asked explorers to find cards that had the same colours as those that had landed colour up.  It was a bit of a dash with explorers turning up every card that they could. rather than figuring it out from the numbers.  Little by little I suppose.

 I don't take in homework in maths explorers sessions but this week, one of our explorers had really looked at the missing multiples game on Nrich.  She went through lots of levels and really figured out how it worked.  I should find a way to get more homework in or talked about or recognised.  Hopefully with the project this time round.  I've set homework to find all the numbers under 100 that are built using friendly primes.  I must remember to send out a reminder.