One of our favourite ‘open ended’ mental maths tasks in Six Blue is Target Number! Each day we are given a target number on the board and we then have five minutes to come up with as many ways of making this target number as possible. We are encouraged to try using all the operations, indices, brackets, square numbers and anything we know really.
After a few days we calculate the average number of sums we create in the time limit and give our sums a difficulty rating out of ten. One being very simple sums and ten being very difficult. With our average and degree of difficulty, we then set ourselves a goal. This goal may be writing more sums than our average in the set time, without decreasing the level of difficulty. Or, it may be increasing the level of difficulty, but still aiming for our average number of sums. All of our goals vary, but these two are common examples.
We always share lots of examples on the board, to check each others working as well as applaud each others clever ideas. Here is an example of some of our work.