After running a recent bar modelling course, I was asked by a year 6 teacher “How would this look in the past SAT papers?” She wasn’t questioning the relevance of bar modelling, rather she was seeking support to bring this method to pupils. Further discussion revealed that she was worried that she would model it wrong for the pupils. I did understand what she meant – she was new to the method and wasn’t yet confident in the models that she presented to the children and wanted to make sure that she wasn’t missing anything. So this is my attempt to show how bar modelling could have been used in the past SAT KS2 papers – I am not guaranteeing that I am not ‘missing something’, but this is how I see it (if you see it differently, brilliant – let the debate begin)…
Throughout these examples I'd ask you to remember that the purpose of bar modelling is to support the pupils in identifying the mathematical relationships within the questions and support identification of operation, not to provide the numerical answer. Pupils still need to be efficient in calculation. Also, even though I have presented one model for each question, there are many more models possible – it comes down to the pupils’ ability to reason and explain their models. Embrace the differences!
Reasoning Paper 2 2017
Reasoning Paper 3 2017
References
STA, Reasoning Papers 2 and 3 (2017)
Charlie Harber
