Explain this
Completing the Square
How the publisher describes it:
“Completing the Square is a set of games played on a board which encourage children to sort and classify objects, colours and numbers. Through playing the games children will develop skills essential for mathematical development.”
Review by Val Griffiths
In brief:
An excellent set of activities that stimulate younger children’s thinking about how we can sort and classify things in several different ways. Easy to produce from the CD with increasingly challenging criteria planned for.
“A great resource to stimulate discussion and exploration in Key Stage 1”
I did not imagine how much quality mathematical discussion could be had from this range of ‘simple’ sorting and classifying games. The book, (more of a booklet of guidance on how to use the games), indicates that this is designed for Reception and Key Stage 1 classes, but I have also used this to stimulate children’s creation of their own investigations in Key Stage 2.
The booklet comes with a CD, which allows you to produce images to be sorted and category labels to organise the sorting. The instructions give ideas of how to introduce the idea that although the children have sorted them that way ‘could they be sorted by different criteria?’ When used with Year 1 pupils the response of ‘you could sort them in lots of ways, everything has friends in every way’ was a comment that was repeated many times. The children were more aware of the idea of classifying as a flexible idea by the end of the session and, I believe the colour and design of the ‘sorting’ items helped with this immensely. The games get increasingly more challenging, so were ideal when looking at differentiated activities for a class.
This is a great resource to stimulate discussion and exploration in Key Stage 1 classroom. I think it will also stimulate you to think of additional activities that you could produce to use in this style. I will be using it to design starter activities and whole class investigations across the school.
Val Griffiths • Leading Maths Teacher and Primary Maths Specialist
Completing the Square
ATM
Members: £15.00
Non-members: £20.00
