Year 2 investigation: 3 dice totals

Dice are a great resource to help with addition and logical thinking. This investigation looks at how many different ways a total of 12 can be made with three dice.

In fact this could be looked at in two different ways. If the dice were all different colours then there would be a great many more answers than if all three dice were the same and the order didn’t matter. For example the dice could be rolled as a 6, a 5 and a 1. With three similar dice  this would be the same as 1, 5 and 6 or 5, 6 and 1.

if the colours were different it could be recorded as

red: 6  blue: 5 and green 1

red 5, blue 6 green 1 etc

I would recommend with young children to keep to three similar dice as there are, in fact, very few answers. See the answer page for this.

Look for logical thinking and a well organised way of displaying results.

3 dice problem