Yay! Today was the first day of kindergarteners coming to group! I walked across the hall and saw the adorable glowing face of M. and picked up sweet J. in the room next to me and off we went.
Seeing as I only had a half an hour, I had to make the most of my time with the kiddos. We sat crisscross applesauce on the carpet of rainbow stripes and started with one of my favorite books, Beautiful Oops. It was the perfect way to open a new group, as we talked about how it was okay to make mistakes, learn from them, and move on.
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The kids both smiled and squealed with delight (and so did I) as we saw fun mistakes being turned into creative and interesting pieces of art. As an extension, I asked the students if they would prefer to make art out of their own beautiful oops marks or if they wanted to do math.
Ultimately, my new kids enthusiasm for math won out. We went to the whiteboards and begun our work right away. I put the problem _____ + ______ + _____ = 10 on the board, and we immediately began to find solutions with multiple addends. The kids were searching for as many solutions as they could find and grew in excitement with each discovery.
What ended up happening, is that the kids starting building off each other's ideas and connections in strategies that generated many solutions. These patterns and rules that the kids were discovering were fantastic ways to have deep conversation about math and think more critically about our work together.
Math Practice 7 (looking for patterns) and Math Practice 8 (explaining rules) are some of the easiest ways to go deeper. We were able to analyze this one problem for 20 minutes and the kids were itching to explore more with subtraction.
It was such a fun way to start the year and I am so glad I get to work with these great kids! I'm looking forward to more math with them in the future.
If you are looking for more open problems like the ones I described here, you can check out my resources here:
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Thank you for writing this blog to share with us the first day of gifted Kinder. My son is very excited to telling me all about the new math problem that he worked with you today. In your blog, you mentioned regarding math practice 7 and 8, where are those?
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to read the blog! I had such a fun time getting to know my new students this week. Math Practice Standards are ways kids approach math. Here is the Math Practice Standards website: https://www.thecorestandards.org/Math/Practice/
ReplyDeleteMath Practice Standard 7 asks students to look for patterns in mathematics to find efficient ways to solve problems. Standard 8 asks students to think about rules (short cuts) in the patterns and explain why they occur. For example, a student in one of my groups was thinking about how 5 +5 = 10, but then realized if they break apart a 5 into a 1 and 4 then 5 + 4 + 1 is one solution and if they break apart 5 into a 2 and 3, there is a second solution of 5 + 2 + 3.
The students used Math Practice 8 by realizing that there were some short cuts to this problem; i.e. deconstruct 5 to find more addends. Other kids began breaking apart larger numbers to find multiple addends.
Today the group took a different direction, and wanted to explore huge numbers that when subtracted also equal 10. We even looked a 1,000,000,000!
I hope that answers your question. Have a great night!
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