I always like to start class with some kind of warm-up. Today’s warm-up included number talks and in particular dot talks. I projected a series of dots on the board and asked the students to tell me how many dots there were WITHOUT counting 1-by-1. Below are some of the student responses. The idea is to try to get students thinking in a different way.
Next, we worked through one of the problems from Building Thinking Classrooms, which I talked about in a previous post. You can check that out here. The problem was called The Tax Man, and the objective was that students had to beat the tax man or in other words have more money than the tax man. This problem had students thinking about factors and strategies.
Students started with 12 “envelopes”, each envelope containing the same amount of money as the number on the envelope. For example, envelope number 3 had $3 in it, number 4 had $4 in it, and so on. The students could start with any envelope that they wanted but the kicker was that the taxman would get any lower multiples. For example, if they choose envelope $12, the tax man would get envelopes 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. For each envelope that you took, the taxman must get at least one envelope. At the end of the game if there were any envelopes left over, then the taxman got those too.
Here are some of the student’s work on the large whiteboards (VNPS) from that activity.
The warm-ups for day 4 were some math puzzles. Students love these. They are from shakethebrain.com
Next, we looked at some patterns. In groups at the boards, students tried to make predictions about what the next pattern might be before more of the pattern was revealed. This was such a rich activity because we were able to connect it with a table of values and a graph and we talked about linear regressions. A lot of great math conversations were happening at the boards with this one.
That wrapped up days 3 & 4 and I loved that class was ending with a buzz in the air.
That’s all for today, I hope you were able to find something that might help you in your teaching journey. Have a great day!