Maths investigations in Horowitz class

Horowitz class regularly take part in maths investigations.  Last week's investigation was about Eric the sheep:

Eric the sheep is lining up to be shorn.  He is last in the queue.  Each time the shearer takes one sheep from the front of the line, Eric sneaks past two sheep to get closer to the front.  If there are 50 sheep in front of Eric to start with, how many will be shorn before Eric gets to the front?

 The aim of the lesson was not just to work out the answer but to use different strategies (that we'd talked about in class) to get to that answer.  Here are some photos of what a few of the children did:

Freya and Saffy used counters and drew a diagram.

Jessica and Freya also drew a diagram, but they used multilink, as did Freddie and Libby plus Ally and Sam.

 

 

 Talitha, Lottie and Amelia kept their multilink the same colours so they weren't confused.  Eric the sheep was the pink cube at the end.

Archie and Fred looked for a pattern in the numbers.

Amelia and Hermione discovered that they could use ratio in their pattern.

 Rebecca and Dougie chose to work alone to start with and compare answers at the end.

 Then anything interesting that was found out was jotted down on a recording sheet, like Holly and Sam are doing here.  Afterwards, we discussed our strategies and how successful they were in this investigation.

"It was fun but very confusing!" said Emily and Annabelle, when they got different answers with different strategies!