Helping the pirates with their maths

These past few weeks, the Preps have received a number of secret messages from their pirate friends.

Redbeard sent the children a counting problem for them to solve. He had four bags of gold coins that he needed to take to the bank, but didn’t know how to add them all together. Learning this, the children quickly set about developing their strategies for adding these double digit numbers together. To focus on place value understanding, they used counters and tens-frames to combine these sets of numbers and find Redbeard’s total.

Meanwhile, Greybeard sent us a cryptic message along with a stack of library books. His challenge was for the preps to find the book with a length and width adding up to 24. To find the solution, they used unifix blocks to measure and then counted on from the larger number to find the total. Ruby was very proud to have found Greybeard’s mystery book and we will be using this book to continue our investigation into the wildlife that lives around our school.

To consolidate our understanding about the pirate’s adventure so far, the children brainstormed some of the important learning experiences they’ve had so far. Following the discussion, everyone went off to write and illustrate their ideas. To do this, the preps have been working on having a go at writing the words they want to use on their own and building on sentence starters that have been modelled to them.

• Quinn – The pirates learnt not to throw their rubbish overboard because it will make all the sea animals and fish hurt and maybe dead.
• Poppy – Don’t drink toilet water otherwise it might make you sick. Sometimes, maybe there are chemicals or germs.
• Mary – They learnt not to wash hands in the toilet because you could get germs. They use soap and clean water every day.
• Hugo – They learnt not to drink seawater because it’s salty.
• Conrad – They learnt how to fix their ships.
• Marcus – They used to cry when things were problems.
• Patrick – they learnt about science and how not to get locked out of their house again.
• Tigerlily – They learnt to be polite.
• Sachi – The pirates learned about pollution and taking plastic out of the water.
• Leon – They learnt to share because of their treasure not being shared and about finding solutions.
• Ruby N – They made good friendships by starting to know each other a bit more.
• Jade – They’re less selfish because after they saw what they’d done they felt bad and tried harder.
• Henrietta – They used to cry when there was one problem and now they don’t even cry one little bit.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the next exciting instalment in the coming weeks.