Tomorrow I have the opportunity to teach a Kindergarten, 2nd and 5th grade class! It is so exciting and interesting to be thinking across all of the grade levels in one day of lesson planning! The most interesting part for me, in thinking through this, is the connections across all of the grades. There is so much potential for conjecture and claim-making supported by their development of proofs.

Background: The 5th and 2nd grade teachers are out at a state math teacher leader meeting so I am teaching instead of the substitute. The kindergarten teacher and I will be teaching it together. I have met with each teacher to chat about where they are within their units and what they have been seeing students do within the current work. I invited teachers both at those grade levels and at other grade levels to pop in if they have the time. I thought it would be great having more people to reflect with after the lessons!

5th Grade: They have just started working with finding a fraction of a fraction using bar models. The initial work is unit fraction of a unit fraction and then moves to non-unit. (My post on that from a couple of years ago on this work, I wish I had done that better, so here is a chance to try something new;) Leigh, the teacher, says they have been really successful in partitioning the bars and arriving at the correct answer. I am thinking about starting with a number routine of either a choral count or a number talk string like 1/2 of 12 = __ of 24… As far as the lesson, I could continue work with this and have students look at noticings after and explore them deeper.They have done these noticings with whole number times a fraction or mixed number, so this could be a revisiting of similarities or differences. OR I could do this cornbread task as a formative assessment as the next piece they will move into is an area model. It may be really helpful for Leigh to see how they are thinking about this before they jump into the work. This is my least planned because I keep bouncing all around with ideas.

2nd Grade: They have been working with even and odd numbers and counting by groups of 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.  All of this work is within contexts of break a group of students into equal teams or everyone having a partner. Tara, the classroom teacher, said the students are really great at determining whether a number is odd or even, however when asked how many would be on each team, a lot of students struggle. They are great if they know a related double fact, however if they don’t they resort to “passing out” by tallies or drawing the picture and physically dividing the number of things in half. For example, if they do not know 11+11 is 22, then finding the number of on each team become passing out 22 things into two groups to find 11. While they are successful in this, Tara and I were wondering why they do not say 10+10=20 and 1+1=2 so 11+11=22. They are able to add 11 and 11 but unable to decompose it as fluently.

In thinking about this, I am inclined to want to connect that addition to halving. I am thinking a counting collection would be fabulous for this. Give students a collection of things to count. Share how we counted them because I am positive they will not count them by 1’s given a large set. We can share as a whole group, record ways in which we counted and determined if our number was even or odd. Then, put the collection back together, switch with a partnering team and then split the collection into two groups. The share would be, “Could you make two equal groups?” “Was your number even or odd? How did you know?” Record strategies. Ask for noticings/wonderings about how they counted and how they divided into two groups.

Kindergarten: The students in this class have been doing a lot of work with ten frames, dot images, counting jars, etc and having students counting and adding to compose a number. They have just begun working on decomposition of number so I immediately thought about the mice activity in Thinking Mathematically. Linda, the teacher, and I planned to do this activity with the students. In preparation, we read NCTM TCM’s article by Zachary M. Champagne, Robert Schoen, and Claire M. Riddell, Variations in Both Addends Unknown Problems. We are going to use 6 bunnies and see how students show all of the ways the bunnies can be inside and outside in a pen. Instead of just giving a context, I was imagining that the students may need a visual of the rabbit pen so I created this image to launch with a quick notice and wonder:

We will then let the students work on finding the different ways in partners and then come back for a whole group share and record the ideas on the board. We are really looking to see two things….1-how they organize their information and 2- the strategies they use. The students will do a notice/wonder about the recorded information. If there is time it would be great to see if students, when given a different number, would apply any of the strategies and/or organizational tools shared.

Going for a run to think through this a bit more! Would love any thoughts/suggestions, as always!

~Kristin