Math Jigsaw Problems

 This year, I've been working with math enrichment groups in addition to my regular gifted classes. In math enrichment groups, I pull 10-20 students from a grade level to work on math problems together. It's a lot of fun, but not without some challenges.

One challenge is that the students are often very quiet! I know that some classroom teachers with chatty classes would see this as a very privileged kind of problem. However, when my goals for the enrichment session include getting students to construct and share viable arguments, this silence can be deafening. The students would be quiet for several reasons. Taken from different classes, they often didn't know each other very well. Some of the students would want to work quickly on their own, while others were more tentative. 

A colleague gave me a copy of the book Get it Together: Math Problems for Groups, Grades 4-12. This book has some great problems and worked well for my older students. However, cutting out the problems is a chore! I decided to create some of my own jigsaw problems.

Here's the idea:

• Problems are basic logic matrix problems, with coin amounts and change to add a math component
• Each student only gets one clue, requiring the students to talk together to solve
• A final problem challenges students to create their own clues
  
  
  

You can find a single problem here: Single Problem Jigsaw Problem Solving.

For all four problems and an answer key, click here: Jigsaw Problem Solving for Math Enrichment.