Question for maths teachers (primary or secondary)

[LemonWeb]

Dd has been given this worksheet www.mathsbox.org.uk/twi/55problems.pdf to keep her busy whenever she finishes her class work early. She can do some of the questions but is feeling quite demotivated as her teacher won’t help her with the ones she can’t do: when she’s asked, apparently he’s said “I don’t know “ loudly which made her wonder whether he was cross or being sarcastic or if he actually didn’t know.

I have looked at the material myself and can see that although she would be able to tackle the arithmetic and algebra, and some of the geometry, a number of the questions seem way above the level taught in primary. I don’t know when children learn trigonometry and surface areas of spheres and cones, but it wasn’t at primary school in my day!

Before I have a word with the teacher, please could one of you kind mn maths teachers tell me what age group this is appropriate for (and if it is KS2 I will talk to dd about how she can ask for help or look things up, rather than suggest different material for her). Background is DD is Y6 and bored to bits with the normal maths (which is the same for the Y5 and Y6 kids in the mixed age class) as she can whizz through it, but she thinks this is a punishment for finishing early.

Some higher ability year 6 s would be able to figure their way through many of the questions but certainly the trig questions and some of the algebra ones would need some explanation first. Obviously there will be some genius children who will fly through them at any age but the vast majority of primary aged children would struggle. It would have been easy for the teacher just to sift through the questions and take out the ones that were difficult to do without teaching input!

Mathsbox is a website of resources for secondary students. This set of resources isn't designed for a particular age group but for secondary maths teachers to dip into and pick out nice problems appropriate to their class. I could use some with Y7 and some with Y11.

On Mathsbox the problems are all separated by topic so he could pick out the applicable ones, and it also has the answers, but I'm wondering if he doesn't have a Mathsbox login.

I would suggest that she does the money, BIDMAS and place value ones, has a look at the Fractions % and ratio ones (not ratio as she won't have done that) and ignores the rest.

Thank you both. I think some of the puzzles are great for year six (things like three integers a,b,c whose product is -12; what is their maximum sum) but good to know I’m not off the mark thinking that they haven’t been taught some topics. At this age ds was given extension problems from nrich, I think, which was much better, so I will mention that to dd’s teacher.

There are lots of super puzzles here suitable for an able Y6 , but the teacher should be picking out ones she has a (decent) chance of being able to access (not getting the right answer isn't a problem necessarily but she must at least be able to make some headway , try out different ideas.)
Seeing them as a punishment is a problem. Surely she is not expected to do exactly the same work as every other student?