In this picture students individually demonstrate their ability to use 3 addends to compose the number 7 after working together with manipulatives to come up with multiple solutions.
I finally began reading "Thinking Classrooms", primarily to see what has evolved with P. Lijedahl's work around random groups, vertical learning, conceptual mathematics. I also wanted to see what I had forgotten over the years. The reason I felt I needed to do this was because students were not enjoying math as much this year as they had in years past.
Some things stood out: I talk to much (lol), and I am not taking as much care as to where I present the task & how as maybe I should be. Also, KG is best in groups of 2.
We have been reading a page or two of Greg Tang's Matherpeices weekly. On this day we read & solved the page on Piet Mondrian. We also watched a video on Mondrian (you can get alot of milage out of his books). Then I placed the students at workstations and told them that there was a painter who wanted to paint a picture with 7 coloured rectangles. Some rectangles were blue, some rectangels were red, and some rectangles were yellow. How may different ways could he paint his 7 coloured rectangles?
Then I gave groups a bunch of coloured rectangles.
Some things stood out: I talk to much (lol), and I am not taking as much care as to where I present the task & how as maybe I should be. Also, KG is best in groups of 2.
We have been reading a page or two of Greg Tang's Matherpeices weekly. On this day we read & solved the page on Piet Mondrian. We also watched a video on Mondrian (you can get alot of milage out of his books). Then I placed the students at workstations and told them that there was a painter who wanted to paint a picture with 7 coloured rectangles. Some rectangles were blue, some rectangels were red, and some rectangles were yellow. How may different ways could he paint his 7 coloured rectangles?
Then I gave groups a bunch of coloured rectangles.
What I like about this is that it had a group work and individual assesment peice. The instructions were short and the students enjoyed it. Also, I can easily create many similar, but novel tasks to work more on composing and decomposing numbers (While I never want to do a good task to death, sometimes it is all about the milage).