I have been looking ahead at some topics I will be teaching in the first term and one of those is inequalities. I wanted to look at some activities where students could identify shaded regions. I thought one activity could be to identify correct inequalities when the co-ordinates were substituted. Then once co-ordinates were identified as lying in a region I thought that then next step was to use this to find the correct inequality.

Inequalities

I have been playing a game called ‘Cheeky Monkeys’ with my daughter and the winner is the one that has the most bananas (the bananas are being held by the monkeys) I watched how my daughter lined them up in rows and then proceeded to count the bananas. I started counting the 1s and then the 2s and 3s so added 4 and 6 and 9 and made 19 but then considered the fact there was 3 rows of (0+1+2+3) and then an additional 1 too. This made me wonder about how we add up groups of numbers that have repeated rows Empty Boxes

I was thinking adding up numbers like these and at first I wanted to group the 8s but then thought that 8+7+3+2 was 20 and then it was just 20 times 6. I often like to check this by doing 48+42+18+12. So I thought it might be a good activity to try with my year 7 class in September. There are lots of ways I could extend it too.

I have looked at some variations of this idea