November 1

Well it was a very long day for all of us but we survived! Everyone did a really good job today considering how tired some of them were after all of their exciting Halloween activities on a Monday!

In Math we have been using a book called One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab to explore representing numbers and our math thinking in different ways. It's also a good entry into using pictures, words, and numbers to solve problems.  In this book we use animals with different amounts of feet/legs and combine them together to find out how many feet are on the beach.

We started off by creating combinations of feet up to 10. Students were required to complete a chart in their visual journals with a column for the animal combinations, a column for the number sentence/equation that matches their pictures, and the total number of legs. Students had to be careful to make sure their equation matched their animal pictures/names. For instance somebody had a spider (8 feet) and a person (2 feet) but their number equation was 1+9=10 which doesn't match. We also found that we had to go back and actually count the feet on our animals because we were sometimes off with our calculations. We had some smaller cut out pictures of the animals that we could utilize as manipulatives to help ensure we counted correctly.

Tomorrow some of us will move onto creating combinations that have 20 feet and others will continue to build our understanding and comfort with 10. I also plan to modify the chart that they create to make it easier for the students to document their work. One column will be for "Words/Names", one column for "Pictures", and one for "Number Sentences"