The Junior school kicked off Barvember with some brain-teasing bar modelling problems. Barvember is organised by White Rose Maths to encourage students to use the bar model – a useful tool for helping children visualise and then solve maths problems. Even some of the most complex problems can be seen much easier when represented visually.

In Upper II, students have been solving these collaboratively using discussion and illustration to bring these problems to life. Some problems were very tricky! 

In maths, a bar model is a pictorial representation of a problem or concept where bars or boxes are used to represent the known and unknown quantities. Bar models are most often used to solve multistep problems with the four operations – addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. Do you think you could solve this?