were so very respectful of one another. They made lots of connections
and also entered an interesting discussion around how to write a
math equation for one of the pictures on a calendar card.
On the calendar card, there were three bunches of balloons. The first
two bunches had 7 balloons each and the third bunch had just 3 balloons.
The students quickly figured out the total number of balloons by adding 7 + 7 + 3.
The answer would be 17 balloons. After posing the question, "Are there any
other ways the equation that could be written?," a student said, "You could
also say, 2 X 7 + 3 = 17." This launched students into an in depth discussion
about whether the order of the numbers mattered or whether the order of
the operations mattered. After testing out several ways, many students said
that they must multiply 2 X 7 first and then add the 3 in order to get 17 for an answer.
It was then determined that it might be good to identify that 2 X 7 must happen first by putting ( ) around the numbers. The equation ended up looking like this:
(2 X 7) + 3 = 17
That way people would know to do the multiplying first, and they would get
the correct answer. Pretty awesome third grade mathematicians!
They will have more opportunities to try out this thinking, make conjectures
and then generalize this thinking.
Nora and Jack confer.
Naomi and John confer.
No comments:
Post a Comment