Here is a tally of one thing our class enjoys. Look at it for a moment. What is the very first thing it tells you, just at a glance, before you count anything carefully?

Two pieces of maths from our year are on the board, and a third we will do out loud together. First a bar chart of lunch choices for our class and the class next door, then a likelihood line drawn live, then a balance where a letter stands for a hidden number. To read a bar, run your eye from the top straight across to the number on the side. Watch and be ready to say which lunch won, where each event belongs, and what keeps the balance level.

Now we solve four missing-number sentences together on the balance. We slide the unknown until both pans match. Then we read the whole sentence back to check.

The sentences are a + 5 = 9, then b + 4 = 12, then 7 + c = 15, and finally d + d = 10. The last one is special. Both blocks show the very same number d, so when one block changes the other changes with it. That means we need one number that, added to itself, makes 10.