Year 6 Number Walls

We welcomed our next years year 7 into school today, and spent a lesson building number walls.

Here is an example of one.

The rule is to get each new number, you add the two numbers underneath.

It can however get tricky.  Here are some of the extension questions we looked at.

What happens if you use the same four numbers as before, but in a different order?

If you have four numbers, but not the bottom four, can you still find all the missing numbers?
Is the answer unique, or are might there be more than possible right answer?

Here is a particularly challenging example of that from a Y6 student!  Well done if you can work it out (it took me while!).

If we give you a target number for the top, how many different ways are there of finishing the wall.  We plan to have a gallery of student work up soon.


For examples of algebraic number walls you can have a look at MyMaths (remember our login and password)

Check back soon for more examples of student work.

Year 7 Data Collection

We're also looking forward to
challenging you on
World Maths day 2012!

Please help my 7B2 maths class.

We are hoping  to collect data from as many Year 5, Year 6 and Year 7 as we can, from around the world.


For international visitors, this is students born between 1st September 1999 and 31st August 2002

The links below are to each group of students questionnaires. Please please complete as many of them as you feel able to do, and pass the link of this blog around your classmates  / friends / family.

We will publish the results of our data collection through this blog also. We are going to leave the forms open for a while to allow schools on holiday in January (I'm looking at you Australia!) to contribute.


Many many thanks in advance.

St Dunstans Visit

Huge thanks to year 6 for letting me visit today, and talk about codes and ciphers.  This is a part of their work on World War 2 at the moment.




We looked at some older ways of hiding codes, including shaving heads, tattooing it, and then letting the hair grow back, wrapping a strip of paper around a stick, and then writing the message, and even writing the message on the inside of a hard boiled egg (sadly this experiment has now failed 3 times, so it is not the most reliable method!!


We moved on to look at Caesar ciphers, pigpen ciphers (font here), and the Sherlock Holmes Dancing men cipher (Font here).  NB. Please ask permission before installing new fonts to your computer.


Eventually we moved on to talk about the magnificent work done by Bletchley PArk code breakers during the second world war.  We found a major flaw in the enigma code by putting loads and loads of 'D's into a virtual enigma, and looking at the output.  Here is the virtual enigma we used - can you spot any flaws!


I want to thank Y6 at St Dunstans again for letting me visit, and making me feel so welcome.  Hopefully many of them will work with us on the National Cipher Challenge when they join us next year