Yesterday I sparked up my hard drive with all my old resources on (I was looking for something and rediscovered a treasure trove of stuff I have made, used, stolen or magpied over the years but forgotten about!) for the first time in about 18 months and came across something that I used in a lesson today. Driving home I got to thinking about how students confidence grows when dealing with a problem that is similar to something they have seen before – I don’t mean the same, I mean similar!

Let me explain … I genuinely believe that students require a “body of knowledge” which they can use to solve problems (by the way, this schema can come in many forms). In addition to this, I feel really strongly that students need to have concrete strategies that they can deploy depending on the problem – one of which is the ability to ask themselves questions such as “have I seen something similar before? What strategies did I use then?”

If you haven’t read Polya’s work, you should – it’s a great starting point … believe it or not I have only recently come across it! I know! Problem solving is such a key part of what maths is about (well it is in my opinion!) but this needs to be nurtured from a young age – there are so many facets of what problem solving is (and I’m not sure I could define it!) so occasionally I will throw in a lesson that has a “softer skills” focus with my year 7’s and 8’s …

At the start of the year I did quite a lot of work looking at the importance of resilience with my year 7 group and trying to instill a sense of trust in my classroom. By that I mean that I want them to know that I would never give them anything that I think they cannot do … even if that means “EVENTUALLY”.  So … today I started the lesson with a couple of easy “Matchstick” problems from this site (there are 100’s of problems on the site of varying difficulties) to get them used to the idea and then I used the ONE puzzle:

I’d structured the lesson in such a way, that we then did a couple of other ones before coming onto the “Add 5 matchsticks to make 9” and of course they nailed it.

This led to a discussion about the importance of having experienced something similar which helped them – we also discussed the fact that sometimes we’ll come across something for which we have no “frame of reference” but the important thing is that every “problem” is something that we can learn from. We also discussed that “eureka” moment when they’ve got a solution and how nice it was to be able to not feel the frustration with the second one, that they did with the first one – I suppose we’d call it “experience”. In my mind, this was a very useful exercise, that had an important message, using a very simple activity (is the phrase – “low threshold”?) which was well worth doing. 

May or may not be useful (for some of you may be a useful reminder of the site, as it was for me!) and of course could be the ramblings of a mad woman.