What I Learned Testing a 60-Minute Math Workshop for 9-11 Year Olds (And I Need Your Feedback)
The crumbs from morning tea were still stuck to the classroom carpet when I herded 12 fidgety kids into the small meeting room last week. Six were Year 5, six were Year 6, all of their teachers had written the same note on their sign-up forms: “Hates word problems.” “Checks out as soon as there’s text on the page.” “Good at basic math, freezes when it’s applied.” I’d spent three evenings putting together a 60-minute math workshop designed to fix that, and I was pretty sure I’d messed up at least three parts before we even started.
I kicked off the first 10 minutes with no worksheets, no rules about correct answers, just one question: “What’s the strangest or most annoying math question someone has asked you outside of school?” Hands went up immediately. Lila said her grandma asked her to split 17 scones evenly between 5 people at morning tea, and no one wanted a crumbly tiny piece. Javi said his dad made him calculate how much gas they’d need for a road trip to the beach before they left. One kid mentioned figuring out how many lollies to buy so every kid on his soccer team got three, plus an extra for the coach. I wrote every question on the whiteboard, no editing, no comments like “that’s not real math.” By the end of 10 minutes, the board was full, and every kid had contributed at least one idea.
Next came 25 minutes of pair work. I paired one Year 5 with one Year 6, and gave them just three rules: pick one question off the board, solve it any way you want, and be ready to explain your process to the whole group. I didn’t require written working out. I didn’t tell them they had to use the long division algorithm they’d learned the week before. That was intentional—most of these kids had been told so many times they were “doing it wrong” that they’d stopped trying anything that wasn’t exactly what the teacher showed them.
Mia, a Year 5 who usually puts her head down and says she can’t do any hard math, ended up with the scone question. She drew five circles in her notebook, drew dots for each scone until she ran out of 17, counted three per circle with two left over, and suggested cutting the two extra into three pieces each. Jake, her Year 6 partner, pulled out a calculator and did 17 divided by 5, got 3.4, and said that was exactly what Mia just figured out, just written with numbers instead of drawings. They argued for seven minutes about whether cutting scones by eye counted as “real math,” and ended up agreeing it worked fine for grandma, so it was good enough.
The 15 minute whole-group share was full of similar moments. One pair messed up the unit conversion on the gas trip question and got an answer that required three full tanks for a 45-minute drive. The whole class laughed, but I didn’t step in to correct them. Another group pointed out the mistake, and the pair fixed it themselves without any input from me. By the last 10 minutes, when I passed out sticky notes for the kids to write their own feedback, no one was ready to leave.
Looking back, the workshop worked far better than I expected, but it’s far from perfect. What stood out most was that every kid stayed engaged the entire 60 minutes. Usually, after 40 minutes of any small group activity, I have at least three kids drawing dinosaurs or passing notes. This time, even the most fidgety kid was leaning in during the share. Mixed-age pairs also worked far better than I expected: older kids had to explain their process to younger kids, which made them think through their work more carefully, and younger kids often came up with simpler, more practical solutions the older kids had missed.
There were obvious kinks, too. Two pairs finished eight minutes early, and I didn’t have a low-effort backup activity ready, so they just chatted about their weekend. That’s not the end of the world, but it felt like wasted potential. Three kids were noticeably wiggly for the last 10 minutes, even though they were interested in the topic—60 minutes feels like it’s right at the limit of most kids’ attention spans for this kind of open work.
This isn’t just a test run for my school, either. I want to put together a free, accessible version of this workshop that any teacher or parent can use, and I’m collecting feedback to work out the kinks before I share it. Even if you don’t run a whole workshop, the core idea works for home too: when my own 10-year-old refused to do his word problem homework a few weeks back, complaining it was all stupid made-up questions, I closed the textbook and we spent 20 minutes figuring out how many pizzas to order for his birthday party, accounting for the kids that eat two slices and the kids that only eat one. He did more math in that 20 minutes than he would have for homework, and didn’t complain once. It’s no prep, low effort, and it pulls math out of the textbook and into the stuff kids actually care about.
Right now, I have three more workshop trials scheduled over the next month, but I want input from more people than just my small group. Is 60 minutes too long for this age group? Would splitting it into two 30-minute sessions on consecutive days work better for most kids? Should I add a list of low-prep extension questions for groups that finish early, or is unstructured chat fine? For teachers, would you want a quick cheat sheet that links each activity to common Year 5 and 6 curriculum outcomes, to make it easier to fit into your lesson plans? For parents who want to run a casual version with a few neighborhood kids, would you want all the prompts to be based on everyday plans like birthday parties and grocery runs, so there’s zero prep needed?
I know what worked for my 12 kids at my school. But every classroom, every family, every kid is different. This workshop is still evolving, and I don’t have all the answers. If you’re a teacher who’s tried open problem-based math for upper primary, or a parent of a 9-11 year old who struggles with word problem anxiety, drop your thoughts below. I’m reading every response, and all of it will help make this better for the next group.
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