Over the last four terms, both teachers and students have been developing and building their mathematical skills.  Throughout the year, teachers and students have been using four Rapid Routines to explicitly teach and explore the 'do's' of the New Zealand Maths Curriculum.  These skills include, investigating, representing, connecting, generalising, explaining and justifying.  

Our last session looked at providing students will tasks that are opened ended.  Meaning that they don't just have one answer.  For some students this can be a challenge as can be so use to just solving the problem and giving the one answer.  Students needed to use all their maths skills to come up with range different situations within the scope of the tasks.

Doing tasks of this nature provide an opportunity for students to justify and explain their solutions, all which are great skills needed when thinking like a mathematician.  Having to use the above mentioned skills provided the students engage in rich mathematical discourse.