Sum Story

Starter of The Day Menu | Transum Software | Privacy Policy

Janet,
Friday, March 28, 2008
"this was a brilliant starter for our year 6. it helped them to make questions, using appropriate things."

How did you use this starter? Can you suggest how teachers could present or develop this resource? Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback and helps make this free resource even more useful for Maths teachers anywhere in the world.
Click here to enter your comments.

If you don't have the time to provide feedback we'd really appreciate it if you could give this page a score! We are constantly improving and adding to these starters so it would be really helpful to know which ones are most useful. Simply click on a button below:

Excellent, I would like to see more like this
Good, achieved the results I required
Satisfactory
Didn't really capture the interest of the students
Not for me! I wouldn't use this type of activity.

This starter has scored a mean of 3.2 out of 5 based on 55 votes.

Previous Day | This starter is for 9 May | Next Day

Transum Shop Visit the Transum Online Shop

Answers

Who knows what your students came up with?

Here is an example:

On the family computer, Harry needed 256 MB of storage space for his music and Will needed 395 MB. Altogether 651 MB of storage space was needed.

They were saving up for a new computer which costs £869. They already had £373 which left £496 still to find. By doing odd jobs for neighbours they could make on average £22 a week. If they worked for 35 weeks they could earn £770. This was more than they needed.

At their school there are 119 students in the year group. They are divided into 17 classes of 7 for registration. All of the students in the year group go on a school trip to see how computers are put together at the local factory. The small buses used by the school each hold 15 passengers. Harry worked out how many buses would be needed:

119 ÷ 15 = 7.933333

This didn't make much sense as he knew that the answer should be a whole number. As no students would be left behind he figured out that 8 buses would be needed.

At the factory Harry won a competition and was given a brand new computer. He was so overjoyed he phoned his brother immediately and they agreed to share the £373 they'd already saved with all of the other students in their year group.

Everyone returned from the school trip happy and Harry and Will had plenty of storage space for their music.

Note to teacher: Doing this activity once with a class helps students develop strategies. It is only when they do this activity a second time that they will have the opportunity to practise those strategies. That is when the learning is consolidated. Click the button above to regenerate another version of this starter from random numbers.

Did any of your students come up with really interesting stories? Let us know here.


	Teacher, do your students have access to computers? Do you have "Laptops in Lessons"? Whether your students each have a TabletPC or share a desktop PC, this activity lends itself to eLearning (Engaged Learning).

Here is the URL which will take them to a concise version of this page.

Transum.org/go/?Start=May9

Here is the URL which will take bring them to this page (with randomly generated numbers) so that they can each make up a story using different numbers.

Sum Story

A Maths Starter of The Day