Math

Throughout the year, students are asked to apply their knowledge and skills to reinforce and deepen their number sense and understanding of a concept.  Students record their responses in their math activity books and then have an opportunity to share their answers. The following are some examples of the open-ended questions and responses from some students.

The Dice Sums was perplexing initially and then the students began to visualize the die and understand the concept of consecutive numbers.

I have some marbles, I give away some to my friends and am left with 15.  How many might I have started with and how many might I have given away? Here many of the students generated their answers using a pattern.

What might the array be with this box of cookies from Trader Joe’s?  We discovered that the gluten free box was an 11x2 with 22 cookies and the regular box was an 11x3 with 33 cookies. And of course, we all enjoyed a cookie after our work.

The students also reviewed the algorithm for addition and subtraction with regrouping through games, open-ended questions, and story problems. And they periodically reviewed the concept of multiplication through arrays.

In order to reinforce their number and problem solving skills, the students created their own logic pattern board to be used at home and at school.  Many students chose patterns that included negative and positive numbers.   

While playing the dreidel game the last week before winter break, the students were becoming more familiar with the concept of probability.  Using actual data generated through playing the dreidel game is a wonderful way to explore probability.  The students looked at the number of ways the dreidel could land and the total number of outcomes possible and then played the game, recording on a bar graph each spin.  In their groups, they figured and represented the outcome of their investigation with a fraction and a percent.  We plan to record all the outcomes from the 2/3 class on the class graph to illustrate the fact that a probability becomes more accurate with more data.

 The students continued to practice their mental math skills and various other strands of math with activities during the beginning of the period. In addition, many of the students are enjoying the weekly facts quiz and noticing their improvement.