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Autumn 2
We have been thinking about the history of numbers. Have they always existed? What did people do before numbers existed? Why do we use them? How difficult would it be without them? We thought about cavemen and building the best fire. How would they have known how many was ‘enough’ and used language such as fewer, more than and equal to compare amounts until we had ‘enough’. This was much harder than getting a given number of sticks. We also found that comparing could be tricky. How we lay out our sticks can change how many we think there are. We thought carefully about how we could know who had more without counting, Then we remembered ten frames. We used cavemen chalk to draw ten frames to compare quantities of sticks.
We have done lots of learning around subitising, addition, subtraction and ten frames. We have also been investigating the purpose of numbers and our number system! Today a some cavemen left us a puzzle to solve. When we arrived in school there was a mysterious box on the teacher’s chair. It was surrounded by sticks and leaves. We think the cavemen had left it because we have been learning about where counting and numbers began - looking at what cavemen would have done before numbers existed! We were very excited but we needed a code to open the box...it was locked!
The cavemen had left clues around our classroom. Cavemen don’t use numbers so they showed us the quantities using ten frames. We used the ten frames and our knowledge about addition to calculate which numbers might open the mysterious box. We recorded what we found.
We tried entering our numbers into the keypad on the box but it still wouldn’t open. We decided we might need a particular order so we worked together using number cards to try out various codes. It still wouldn’t work. Then we started to think the cavemen might have been logical with the order the numbers might be in. We tried sequencing the numbers from smallest to largest.
It worked! The code opened the box and we found treasure inside. We all shared the treasure. We are so pleased we could use our maths!