Mental Mondays #12

This mental and oral starter is a quick way to display a range of calculations.

Like our other mental and oral starter ideas this is easy to adapt to suit the needs and abilities of a range of children.

The idea here consists of a coloured number grid and a series of questions. We have attached a PowerPoint file with a selection of grids.

You display one such gird, like this:

...and challenge the children to respond to the questions as quickly as possible.

The main feature here, of course, is the flexibility. Using the coloured cells as indicators it is easy to create one-off questions. In the example presentation we stuck to addition and multiplication, but there is no end to the complexities that you (or the children) can generate.

The PowerPoint includes seven 'template' slides starting with numbers which total 10, and moving on to pairs of numbers which give a product of 24.

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