I forgot to tell you about the theme day we had last week. Last Thursday we had a day about horses in honour of Azadeh and Kasia. In the morning we got to design our own horse and then we were challenged to write about it using complete sentences and giving lots of details. Writers described what their horses looked like, what they could do and what they liked eating, among other things.
In the afternoon we had a math mystery to solve. We knew that in the barn there were 28 legs (belonging to horses), but we had to figure how many horses that made. Three different strategies emerged: drawing horses and counting legs until we reached 28, drawing 28 legs first and then grouping them into groups of 4 for each horse, and finally skip-counting by 4 and counting how many 4s that made.
On Friday, we reflected on these strategies and used them to use another leggy question, this time with chickens and cows. Here are the 3 strategies in action for the second animal problem:
Today we learned how to write a complete addition sentence (we had not focused on the + symbol before), and we played a fun dice game to practice adding single-digit numbers, using counters, and writing the matching number sentence. We will eventually set up some centres where we play different games that get us adding, subtracting and writing number sentences, but our focus will always be the open-ended show your strategy type questions, like the horse question. Ask your mathematician to show you the dice game - they really loved it today!