We are continuing to work really hard on building a foundation for addition. We have moved to concentrating on the larger sums, numbers 10-20. Further, the children have begun to explore dividing numbers into three and four addends. This week we used candy corn as our fun and tasty manipulative. The students had the focus number of candy corn pieces in a Ziplock. For instance, on Wednesday, we worked on 15 so there were 15 candies in each bag. Then the children had to come up with as many combinations for 15 as possible. They recorded their answers on a giant candy corn recording sheet. They used 2, 3, and even 4 addends to come up with a variety of solutions for 15. These mathematicians worked so hard! They were really proud of their thinking.
Working with the candy corn also helped us transition into our next objective, working with missing addends. I would ask them to make a pile of 8 candy corns, then have them calculate how many candy corns were left in the other pile. To see if the children were getting the concept, I gave them a math journal problem but they did not have the bag of candy corns to help them figure out the problem. The children amazed me. Most everyone was able to visualize the problem and show their thinking. Look at all the different ways the children approached this algebra story problem. Wow! We have number bonds and pictures, counting on using fingers, and referring to our class number wall.
No comments:
Post a Comment