Odd one out – using Oracy activities to support Maths.

Using Oracy enhances learning particularly when children are using discussion to discover a concept for themselves. Using the odd one out activity allows you to check understanding and develop ideas.

This activity can be used as a warm up or in fact in any part of the session. When I plan the odd one out activity I tend to throw in a red herring or have a few ideas going on to give the children the opportunity to discuss their ideas in more than one way.

Using the odd one out activity

Take a look at this odd one out activity. This is for a Year 2 class.

This odd one out activity allows for a discussion about odd and even numbers and one and two digit numbers.

In this particular activity the aim was to encourage the children to talk about why a number could be the odd one out and why. We were thinking about classifying the numbers in different ways. The discussion led children to consider and talk about one and two digit numbers, odds and evens as well as numbers that are divisible by 2.

Valuing different ideas

The beauty of the odd one out activity is there may well be more than one correct answer. This allows your children to think for themselves and be confident that even if they have a different idea it does not mean they are wrong. The talk in this activity encourages children to value one another’s ideas.

All too often children are afraid of getting the answer wrong. They have a belief that is encouraged by our teaching that Maths is all about right and wrong answers. In fact what we want the children to achieve is a mathematical discussion about their ideas as that is where the learning is. Different ideas means we consider other possibilities.

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