Today the students developed their mental skills by working in pairs on a math task.

 In their pairs the students had an amount of blocks from 5-15 in a paper bag. The students then would ask their partner a question, for example: 

"If I had 15 blocks in  the bag and took out 6, how many would I have?". 

Students could not see into the bag so they had to mentally or visually create the equation to subtract and solve how many blocks still remained within the bag.  

Here we can see she has taken out 8 blocks and was using mental math to subtract how many were left over from the original 12.

The one student is showing the other student that after he removed all of the blocks there would be zero left in the bag. The student on the right is counting the double check the bag is empty.

Here the one student has just asked "how many blocks would be left in the bag if I took out three when there was 8"

Mental Math at work!

"I had ten dinosaurs in the bag.
I have taken out five.
How many are in the bag?"


"I think that there are four dinosaurs in the bag."