3-Act Math Lessons

I follow lots of math teachers on Twitter and on blogs and learn about many new ways to teach math from them. (I also follow teachers of other content areas, too.) One of the ideas I was interested in was something called 3-Act Math Lessons. I had seen many examples of teachers using this format for a math lesson in middle and high school and knew that it would be great in elementary school, too. I just never took the time to write/film one for our crew. Then one day I ran across a site that had 3-Act Math Lessons that were written for elementary school (K-6). Someone had written some and shared them. You can see that there are problems for a wide variety of grade levels on the site - the grade level is the first number in the label for the standard that the problem is working on. We have tried a couple of these this year. One of them was the Pringle Ringle problem that we did a week or so ago. The crew loved it.

Pringle Ringle


These are the types of problems that you can do with your child over the summer. These types of situations pop up all the time in our daily lives. We just need to take advantage of them and use them to talk about math with our kids.

Guess My Number

We frequently play the game "Guess My Number" when we have a few minutes where we have to wait - waiting for the Kindergarten crews to finish lunch and so on. I pick a number and the crew guesses number and I tell them if my number is higher or lower than their guess. I give them the range before we start: "I am thinking of a number between 1 and 50" or "I am thinking of a number between 1 and 100." Many of them are beginning to be very strategic in their guessing and they can figure out my number very quickly.

In the last few weeks, we have been working a lot on subtraction concepts and the difference between two numbers. I found a fun way to change up our Guess My Number game using subtraction. You can play both versions of this game with your child, too. Check out the photo below to see the new version.

Important Dates
5/24 Sixth Grade Showcase of Learning Presentation
6/1 Last Day of School - All School Drum Circle at 9 am  

Functions in Math

This week we began to learn a little bit about functions in math. We took a look at some strings of numbers and tried to decide what was happening to each number in the string to get the next number. Sometimes we know the "rule" and sometimes we have to figure out the "rule". The problems we are working on look like this - ask your child to tell you all about it:

In	Out
4	14
50	60
22	32
55	65

Arts and PE Class
Our Arts and PE class next week is PE.

Strategies for Solving Math Facts

We are learning various strategies for solving math facts. These strategies will help us have a deeper understanding of addition and subtraction. These strategies are really things we would not write down but are ways to think and create mental images as we solve problems in our head. The charts below show in writing some of the thinking that we are trying to do as we solve problems mentally.

Math Routines

To help get our minds ready to think about math problems each day we begin our math block with a math routine. I follow lots of fantastic math teachers on Twitter and gather up all of their great ideas and adapt them for our crew. Twitter is a great place for teachers to learn and share with each other. Here are the math routines that we do each day:

Make It Close Monday

Tantalizing Tuesday

Which One Wednesday

Thoughtful Thursday

Figure It Out Friday

On Make It Close Monday we look at a large collection of items and try to estimate how many items there are in the collection. Usually we use objects from around our classroom but sometimes we use the website, Estimation 180, and look at some of their photos of collections. We always ask what estimate would be too low for our collections and what estimate would be too high for our collections and then we give our estimates. Then we count the objects (by 1s, 2s, 5s, or 10s) and pause periodically to adjust our estimates as we see how the count is coming along.

On Tantalizing Tuesday we look at growth patterns and try to figure out what would come next in the pattern or series of drawings. Often we use our blocks to set this up but sometimes we use the website, Visual Patterns, and work on some of their patterns. Sometimes we use blocks to help us, sometimes we use drawings and sometimes we use words. 

On Which One Wednesday we look at a set of four related pictures and decide which one doesn't belong and why. We have figured out now that there is always more than one answer to these problems and we love to try and think of as many as we can. I gather many photos from the Which One Doesn't Belong website.

On Thoughtful Thursday we try and solve what might be called word problems. We have a wide variety of stories in these problems and find them interesting. We use counters, models, pictures and manipulatives to help us solve these problems. We begin by trying the problem on our own, then we work with our table group and finally we talk about the problem as a whole crew. We might also try a 3-Act Task on these days, too.

On Figure It Out Friday we do what we call a number talk or a number string. Number talks can include using dot images or tens frames to solve addition and subtraction problems. After we have all had some time to think about it, we share out what we have been thinking. We listen to how other students solve the problems and get ideas from each other. These problems are usually done mentally and without any counters, paper or manipulative other than the representation in the original problem. 

 
 

How You Can Be Good at Math, and Other Surprising Facts About Learning

 
Math is...

Two-Digit Addition and Place Value

In math today, we introduced the concept of two-digit addition. We did this by using our base-10 blocks. We created silly stories about animals and how much they would weigh together. Then we represented the weight of each animal with base-10 blocks and added the blocks together. We did not focus on the regular math notation for this yet. We are working on building a deep understanding of place value and how addition works and will focus more on how to write it in symbols (25 + 36 = 61) at a later time. (I did write some problems using that notation so some children may begin using the symbols now. It just depends on how ready they are for that step.) Check out the pictures below for some examples.

Arts and PE Class
Our Arts and PE class next week is Art.

This is a way that you can draw the blocks to use this system at home.

Adding with Cuisenaire Rods

On Friday, we used our new Cuisenaire Rods to begin working with addition facts. Working with a partner, the first thing we did was to make one complete set of rods from 1 to 10 that we could use to help us figure out which rod was 4 units long or 7 units long, etc. Then we chose one rod as our base and tried to find as many combinations that we could make that would equal that rod's length.  For example, some of us chose the rod that was 7 units long. We found that we could make rods that were 7 units in length in many other ways: 3 + 4, 5 + 2, 6 + 1, 1 +1 + 1 + 1 +1 + 1 + 1, 5 + 1 + 1 and so on and wrote them in our math notebooks. We had a great time trying to find as many combinations as we could. If we thought we had found all of the combinations, we moved on to a different base rod. We were sad when it was time to stop but we will continue working on this during Exploration Stations now.

Learning Basic Math Facts

We are beginning to focus on learning basic addition and subtraction facts. Some of us are just beginning to learn them while others of us are much more comfortable with them. This is such an important skill to practice at this age. Familiarity with the basic addition and subtraction facts will make such a difference in your child's math career. I know I have mentioned this before but I have taught grades 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 (including Algebra). I can tell you that those students who had a solid foundation with their basic facts were so much more ready to tackle new math concepts and to use those basic facts to solve more complicated problems.  Now is the time to practice those facts with your child for a few minutes each day. We have begun to learn new games - both online and offline that will help us practice our basic facts. You can also help by asking your child to solve a fact as you are driving in the car and then ask them how they solved it or you can play various games both online and off to practice (rules for one game you can play are below). You can use whatever method you and your child enjoy. It's just important to work at it a little bit each day and to keep it fun and interesting.

Having said all of that, I do want to emphasize that what I feel is most important for students to learn in math is how and why things (like addition) work the way that they do. I want to develop their mathematical thinking and problem solving skills. If I had to choose between learning basic facts and developing mathematical thinking, I would absolutely choose mathematical thinking. Thankfully we don't have to make this choice. I will, however, always focus more on mathematical thinking in class and spend smaller amounts of time learning the basic facts. In our every day lives, we have so many tools at our disposal that can help with basic facts but we don't have tools that can do the deeper thinking and understanding for us so that is where my focus be.

Addition Top-It

The game is played with a deck of number cards, 4 cards for each number 0-9. (This can be a regular deck of cards with the face cards removed.) As many as four children can play, but at first, children should play the two-player game.

1. Shuffle the deck and place it on the desk with the cards face down.

2. At each turn, players turn over two cards and call out the sum. Players should check each other's sums.

3. The player with the higher sum takes all the cards. In case of a tie, players turn over two more cards and call out the sum. The player with the higher sum takes all the cards from both plays.

4. Play continues until there are fewer than 4 cards left in the deck. The player who took more cards wins.

Information for Parents
Last year I ran across this article about learning basic facts that I thought you might find interesting, too:

Learn math without fear, Stanford expert says 

You can find more math resources for parents on the Parent Resources page of our crew blog.

Fun apps,websites and board games to help practice basic math facts:

Apps:
Addimals
Subtractimals
Door 24 Plus - use i-Ready login information
Hungry Fish
Mathtopia

Websites:
Resources page on our crew blog has links to several good websites for addition and subtraction practice

Board Games:
Shut the Box
Prime Climb - click here to see a short video about the game Prime Climb and how to modify it for younger children

Important Dates
1/13 No school for students - Professional Development Day
1/16 No school - Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
2/2 Chinese Folktale Play Performance with Ms. Chelsea at 3:30 pm
2/17 No school for students -  Professional Development Day
2/20 No school - President's Day
2/23 Winter Voyage for 1st grade - one day only, not an overnight trip, no day of rest needed
3/20 - 4/3 Spring Break


Library
Because we don't have school on Friday, we will visit the library in small groups throughout the week. Please have your child return their books as soon as they are finished with them and then they can visit the library to check out new books.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You
Thank you to Calvin for donating another Snap Circuits set to our crew. It is helpful to have another set so it is easier to share with 24 students. Thank you to Nicholas for donating a big package of AA batteries to use in the Snap Circuits. We couldn't use the sets without batteries. We are learning so much from the Snap Circuits already!

If you would like to make a donation to our crew, we can always use sets of headphones for our ipads and computers. Thanks to Connor for donating a set already.

Thinking About Math

Jo Boaler, professor from Stanford University, and her students created a great video about how we can learn math better and how we should change our thinking about math. I showed it to the crew today.  I have embedded the video below so you can watch it, too. It is worth your time. It is only 8 minutes long. If you get this post by email, you will need to go directly to the blog to view it.

Measuring in Non-Standard Units

We have been learning about measuring in math recently. Yesterday we talked about nonstandard measurement or using other items to measure rather than a measuring tool. Below are some photos of us using our bodies to measure things around the room. We measured in hands, feet, hand spans, paces, arm spans, digits, cubits and more.