The Power of a Piece of Paper

I recently attended an INSET day on maths, particularly focussing on Numeracy. We were very privileged to have a talk from Jennie Pennant from NRICH and I must say, what a charismatic, inspiring lady she was. Her session was an hour and a half long but it just whizzed by and I was left with a feeling of wanting more.

I wanted to share one of the ideas she gave us; such a simple idea but one with so much potential. All you need is 1 sheet of paper per child. Fold into 16 rectangles and fill each one with the digits 0-9 (there will be some repeats) a la:

From random

Here are some of the activities that could then be done:

• get children to make a 2/3/4 digit number (either horizontally or vertically) then order their numbers on each table
• In pairs, make number bonds to 10/100/1000 
• In pairs, who can add 2 numbers to make near hundreds
• Make a number with 7 tens/6 hundreds/3 units etc
• Make a multiple of...
• In pairs, subtract 2 numbers - who can make the smallest difference/largest difference etc
• Fold a line/square to add to...
• Show me a number more than/less than...
• Guess my number
• Show me a prime/square number
• find pairs of halves/doubles
• Triangles - make 3 numbers that add to 180

I'm sure there are hundreds more activities that could be done with this piece of paper but we ran out of thinking time.