You might enjoy using youcubed's Penny Collection task with your students as the school year winds down. It is an open, high-floor, low-ceiling task—designed to engage all learners while encouraging deep thinking and rich mathematical exploration—a powerful example of teaching through big ideas.
Penny Collection
This activity allows students to explore how numbers are composed by having them look at different ways of grouping them. There are many different strategies and methods students can use to come up with a solution. Students can use actual pennies, draw diagrams, and use charts to keep track of their findings. As students explore, they will notice many different patterns in the numbers they are exploring.
Task Instructions
Consider a collection of pennies with the following constraints:
When the pennies are put in groups of two, there is one penny left over. When they are put in groups of three, five, or six, there is also one penny left over. But when they are put in groups of seven, there are no pennies left over. How many pennies could there be?
Topic
Number Sense
Grades
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Find many more tasks like this, organized by grade and topic, on youcubed's Tasks page.