Brain flakes are my new favourite resource. I first stumbled upon them when I saw this instagram post.
It immediately grabbed my attention as I absolutely love teaching place value and I especially love using creative ways to do so.
Several years ago, I invented my own unit of learning for teaching place value in KS2, which began with the image of Stone Age counting. I would get children to come up with ideas about what it might be (one of my favourite responses has to be “drawings of eyelashes!”).
Once I revealed the true answer, that it was found in a cave, dating back to 10,000 years ago, it led into an investigation of the Egyptian Number System. Following on from this, I would invent my own number system, drawing a different symbol for 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 and we would do lots of investigative work around it. For instance, I would say “How many ways can you make 24 using my number system?” or I would give them a ‘code’ and they had to work out what number I had represented.
After that, I would get my pupils to invent their own number system.
So naturally, when I saw this post about teaching place value using Brain Flakes, it was like seeing my idea but in a concrete form using manipulatives! I instantly purchased a set and haven’t looked back.
It’s up there with the Robot Mouse in terms of versatility! The more you use them, the more it opens up your mind to the infinite opportunities.
Read on to discover some of the ways you might like to use brain flakes in your maths teaching.
Place value
Below is an image showing how I linked place value counters to the brain flakes. With this pupil, I had nine of each place value counter (from thousands to ones) and corresponding brain flakes. Having just 9 to choose from consolidates that you can only have a maximum of 9 in each column. My pupil then created a structure using as many as she wanted from each colour. She then had to calculate what number she had made. This could be done by seeing how many were left behind, or by counting the amount used.
This also works really well for place value up to one million and beyond!
Times Tables
Brain flakes are a fabulous way to practise times tables skills. This activity is a really fun one, that all my pupils have thoroughly enjoyed.
You can do this activity by allocating each person a number (I tend to go for something bigger than 20 but less than 60) and then give each colour brain flake a number from 1-12. This becomes the ‘key’.
Each person has to represent their number in as many ways as possible – for example, if someone was representing 32 using the below key, they may do:
16 browns
8 yellows
4 greens
They can also do a combination of colours – e.g. 4 blues plus a yellow.
I usually set a time limit and see how many ways they can come up with in 8 minutes. You can scroll through the photos here:
You can develop this idea further by writing underneath the calculation for making the number as this is brilliant for showing the relationship between times table facts. E.g. looking at the example below, the pupil was able to see that
3×16
is the same as
6×8
which is the same as
12×4
and we discussed how double 3 is 6 and half of 16 is 8, so it balances.
Factors
Following on from this idea, you can use brain flakes to consolidate learning on factors. For instance, you can give the brain flakes colours from 1-12 and get the children to make a factor bug for 20 using them – e.g. how many 1s, 2s, 4s, 5s and 10s would you need to use to make 20? It’s also a good time to discuss why you can’t make 20s out of 3s, 6s, 7s, 8s and 9s.
Multiplication and division
I used brain flakes to launch formal multiplication methods. I displayed the sum 18 x 6 and we talked about what this actually meant. We then used place value counters to show 18, and explained that it is 18 six times. They then make 18 six times out of the brain flakes. When I asked them how we could calculate the answer, the automatically said we could count the purple ones first and then the blue ones – so 10 x 6 + 8 x 6, which is a great way of showing the distributive law in action.
You can then link this to division and show that 108 ÷ 6 = 18.
Decimals
Maths Corner had the fabulous idea to use brain flakes to support with the teaching of decimals – you can give each brain flake a value of tenths and get the pupil to make a decimal number using the key.
Money
This is another fabulous idea from Maths Corner (and her daughter came up with the activity on her own, which is amazing!), where she calculated how much one brain flake cost, and then made these sculptures and calculated how much each would cost, and how much she would sell them for.
Number bonds to 10 and 100
For teaching number bonds to 10, give a value to a different colour brain flake from 1-10. Pupils can then show 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5. They can then create more interesting ways to make 10 – e.g. 3 + 2 + 4 + 1. Similarly, you can give each brain flake a value of a multiple of 10, from 10-100 and do the same activity but with number bonds to 100.
Algebra
This idea came from when my pupils were representing numbers using the brain flakes in the times table activity. I thought it would be a fun challenge to get my 1:1 pupils to work out the value of each colour and it lent itself really well to using algebra:
I hope that was useful! You can buy your own brain flakes here.
Comment on the blog if you have tried any of these ideas, or if you have more to add 🙂
