Week 7: Mental Computation

Mental computation is the ability to problem solve in your head. Mental computation strategies are used for topics such as addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. For a mental warm up activity in the classroom, an idea is doubling, used for addition. The activity for stage two students, involves the class working in pairs with a mini whiteboard or their own devices. The teacher can call out a question such as double 8, and the students have ten seconds to work out the answer mentally using their mental computation strategies. The teacher can then check these answers and if the students get it correct they keep playing, but if they get it wrong, they then come out to the front of the class to help with checking if the students get the answers correct by still figuring out the answer. An extension to this activity could be to incorporate other random questions such as 8+9 or questions using higher numbers, in order to make the students question and think a bit harder, which may encourage them to use different strategies if possible. To simplify the activity for any student that is struggling or who may need extra help for learning difficulties; we can make the activity to be a group task, where they work as a group to encourage further conversation and strategy. We can also take away the aspect of competition, where no one ‘sits down’ and they all continue to answer the questions in order to help the students feel more comfortable using the skill. (“Mental Computation”, 2019)