Working on an elimination task (Invergowrie Primary School, P2)

Working together: organisation

There are four strategies designed for P2 pupils to use 'Work together', 'Make a 3-D model', 'Look for a pattern' and 'Find different combinations'.      

Dorothy prefers to introduce one strategy at a time, practise it for a while and go back to it at a later date. 

The school has a resource bank selected by the problem solving working party from a variety of commercial products. Dorothy particularly likes to use photocopiable material from a book called Group Solutions and adapts some of the problems herself, making different versions using multilink cubes and Compare Bears. 

Dorothy has a list of problems that she has chosen for assessment purposes. She records how well her pupils have tackled these problems using a ‘traffic lights’ system. There is also a sheet to be passed on to the next teacher, which indicates whether a pupil needs support in problem solving. 

Pupils keep a self-evaluation sheet on which they record the name of the problem, the strategy used and whether they found the problem easy or not.