Apologize, not much time to write, but today was so cool I had to share!  I am in the midst of using this work to better plan for tomorrow.

Short version: After our predictions yesterday, I posed 0.4 x 0.2 (I changed the problem to 0.6 x 0.4 for my second class) and asked the students to individually jot down what they thought the answer is. I was looking to see how they intuitively thought about the problem.  As expected, I saw 0.8 and 0.08 (2.4 and .24) as I walked around. I wrote both answers on the board, asked them to write their reasoning in their journals and then we shared as a class. No telling which was right or wrong, just sharing and listening.

Some great thinking and critiquing of each others’ reasoning ensued and then I sent them off to come to a consensus as a table and create a poster of how they thought about it!

Now, where to go with this work? They could just look at strategies, but I want them to think deeper about the meaning of the problem.  After chatting with my colleague Faith tonight, who is coming to observe tomorrow, we are going to have the students walk around to the other group posters and talk about what they saw on the other posters that changed the way they thought about the problem.

From there, I really wanted them to think about a context for this problem and Faith suggested also thinking about what happens are you begin to adjust the numbers and why….really thinking about the reasonableness of answers. What happens when one factor increases? What happens when one factor goes over a whole? What happens if the factors go into the hundredths? Does the product increase or decrease? Why?

So many fun convos to be had tomorrow!

-Kristin