Tag Archives: 5th Grade

Supporting Mathematical Habits of Mind

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 “The widespread utility and effectiveness of mathematics come not just from mastering specific skills, topics, and techniques, but more importantly, from developing the ways of thinking—the habits of mind—used to create the results.“

Cuoco, Al & Goldenberg, Paul & Mark, June. (2010).

Math curriculum lessons are often aligned to the Standards of Mathematical Practice. These practices can provide opportunities for students to develop the mathematical habits of mind described by Al Cuoco, Paul Goldenburg, and June Mark.

Mathematical Habits of Mind

  1. Students Should Be Pattern Sniffers
  2. Students Should Be Experimenters
  3. Students Should Be Describers
  4. Students Should Be Tinkerers
  5. Students Should Be Inventors
  6. Students Should Be Visualizers
  7. Students Should Be Conjecturers
  8. Students Should Be Guessers

The thing I love most about these habits of mind is the fact that as I read them, I can picture the math content and activity structures that could provide opportunities for students to develop these habits. I also really like the connectedness of them, where I can easily imagine how one habit leads students to engage in another. And because my favorite Math Practice is SMP7, look for and make use of structure, I am particularly drawn to the habit of conjecturing in math class. Excitingly, last week 5th graders were engaging in a topic that provided a perfect opportunity to conjecture.

Fraction Division

This past week, 5th grade students were dividing unit fractions by whole numbers and whole numbers by unit fractions. If you have ever taught this, you probably immediately picture students overgeneralizing these two different situations. In the vein of answer-getting, they often think the quotient will either always be a whole number OR always be a unit fraction – both including the product of the denominator and whole number in some way. And even though students have engaged in a lot of the habits within this work, it was with the two situation types separately.

To address the overgeneralization, we wanted them to engage in mix of the situation types in order to compare them. We launched with the following 2 problems, purposefully choosing the same numbers to elicit the difference in what is happening in the situation and the resulting quotients.

Student Thinking

As anticipated, we saw wonderful diagrams that generally matched each situation, but we could tell by the shading and erased work on Situation B that students were thinking that because they were working with fractions, their answer had to be a fraction.

We focused our discussion on the questions, “Where is 1 cake in your diagram?”, “Where are the people in your diagram?”, “Where are the servings in your diagram?”, and “Where is your answer in the diagram?”. Through those questions we saw a lot of labeling revisions to their work to make it clearer.

Mathematicians Talk Small and Think Big

“The simplest problems and situations often turn into applications for deep mathematical theories; conversely, elaborate branches of mathematics often develop in attempts to solve problems that are quite simple to state.”

Cuoco, Al & Goldenberg, Paul & Mark, June. (2010)

While the discussion was productive and we saw a ton of sense-making, visualizing, describing, and revision, I was left wondering how this moment transfers to the next time a student engages in one of these division situations.

I love this idea of tinkering around with smaller ideas to conjecture about larger ideas as a great way for students to deeply understand a concept and be able to transfer their understanding to the next time they engage in that concept.

So, for the tables done their discussions early, I asked them to write things they think are true about the division and lingering questions they might have. Here are a couple examples:

Next Steps

The question I am always left with after students have such amazing insights and questions is, ‘How do I keep this math conversation alive?’ With the pacing of curriculum, it can be challenging to dig into each of these moments for an extended period, so we need ways to let this thinking extend across the year.

One thing we could do is ask students if we can launch the next class period with their ideas. For example, I might ask the first student if I could post, “The order matters in division.’ at the start of class the next day and have the class discuss if they think that will always be true and why. This would be a great way to elicit the difference in quotients when we divide a whole number by a fraction and vice versa.

Another option that I used in my classroom, was posting the ideas on what I called a Class Claim wall. When students make a claim or conjecture, we posted them on the wall and then anyone could revisit them at any point and time.

I think both of these options are a wonderful way for students to continually think small and big about concepts while allowing us the opportunity to communicate to them that just because a curriculum unit of study wraps up, the learning about that concept continues.

-Kristin

If you want to read a bit more about claims and conjectures, I was kind of obsessed with it when I was teaching and blogged a lot:

Developing Claims – Rectangles With Equal Perimeters
Geometry Is Worth The Extra Time…
The Meaning of Subtraction

How Planning Mistakes Can Lead To Great Student Thinking….

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The other day I did this fraction clothesline activity with a 5th grade class and today I had the chance to do it again with another 5th grade teacher, Leigh. It is always so nice to get to have a do-over after having time to reflect and think more about what the students thought about both during and after the activity.

I really thought the conversation was great during the clothesline activity, but it took too long the first time. We noticed that some students began to disengage. To try and improve upon that, Leigh and I decided to give only one card to every pair of students instead of each student having one. However, due to us wanting to keep a few important cards we wanted to hear them talk about, some pairs had two.

I also did not like my placement of 0 being at the very end of the left (when looking at it) end of the string. I moved it out some and talked about the set of numbers that falls on either side of the 0. I felt much better about that this time around!

In the planning of the first clothesline activity, we took fractions from the work the students had been doing with percents and decided on putting 100% in there, completely thinking it would be at 4/4. As the student placed it, however, I started realizing that I never thought about the difference of 100% in terms of the area representations the students had been using versus 100% when talking about distance on a number line. But now, having time to reflect on the card, I thought it would make a great journal entry!

As we neared the end of the card placements, I handed the 100% card to a student and told her it was going to probably cause a lot of discussion but just put it where she thought it went. She said she got it, walked up there and placed it on top of the 2 (the highest number on the line). There were some agree signals going on and some other hands that shot right up to disagree. We talked about it a bit and then we asked them to journal their ending thoughts so we could move on with the rest of the lesson about different sized wholes.

Some thought that 100% was at 4/4 on the number line because it equals 1….

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Some thought it was at 4/4, but because of the conversation became a bit unclear…

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Some thought it goes on the 2 because it is the biggest number on the number line…

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Some related it to different contexts with different wholes…

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And one student said it can be anywhere with beautiful adjustments as it moves….

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What a great day revisiting my planning mistake!

-Kristin

5th Grade Fraction Clothesline

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Today, I had the chance to plan and teach with a 5th grade teacher and it was awesome! Last week, this class had just finished a bunch of 100s grid shading in thinking about fraction/percent equivalencies, so we picked up planning the lesson in Investigations with the fraction/percent equivalent strips. Instead of the 10-minute math activity, we thought it would be really interesting to do the clothesline number line to kick off the class period.

We chose fractions (and one percent I will talk about later) based on the fractions the students had been working with on the grids. We chose fractions based on different comparison strategies that could arise such as:

  • Partitioning sections of the line
  • Distance to benchmarks
  • Equivalent Fractions
  • Common Denominator
  • Greater than, Less than or equal to a whole or 1/2

We settled upon the following cards:

1/4, 3/4, 4/4, 1/3, 4/3, 5/10, 2/5, 100%, 3/8, 1 5/8, 1 7/8, 4/5, 11/6, 1 6/10, 1/10, 9/8, 12/8, 2

To start, I put the 0 toward the left of the line (when you are looking at it) and we practiced with a few whole numbers. One student volunteered to be first and I handed her a card with the number 7. As she walked up, looked around, walked up and down the line, looked at me like I was playing some type of trick on her, we immediately had the conversation about how knowing the highest numbered card would be super helpful. She settled on putting it toward the far right side and had a seat. I gave another student the 10 card. He put that at the far right and adjusted the 7 to be “about 2 cards away” from the 10, leaving a really long distance from 0-7 for them to think about. We had some students disagree so we talked about distance and adjusted the cards to be more reflective of distance. Since the conversation of half of the distance to 10 came up, I handed another student the 5 card and he placed it right in the middle. The discussion went back to the 7 and they decided that since 7.5 would be halfway between 5 and 10 that 7 had to be a little bit less than the halfway of 5 and 10.

Then, we moved into the fraction cards. We gave each pair of student two cards. In hindsight, for times sake, I would probably only do one card per pair. I gave them one minute to talk about everything they knew about the fractions they had and then we started. I asked for volunteers who thought their card would help us get started and called on a boy with the 1 7/8 card. He went up and stood all of the way to the right and said he couldn’t put his on. I asked why and he said that since the cards were all fractions the line could only go to 1 so his is more than one and can’t go on here. I asked if anyone in the class had a card that may help us out and a student with the 2 card raised her hand. She placed her card all of the way to the right, said “maybe it goes to two” and the other student placed it just to the left of it because, “it is only 1/8 from 2.” Awesome!

We went along with the rest of the cards and so many amazing conversations, agreements and disagreements happened along the way. There are a few things that stand out in my mind as some great reflections on the activity:

  1. A student had placed 5/10 halfway between 0 and 1. The next student placed 2/5 just to the left of the 5/10 because, “I know 2 and a half fifths is a half so that means that 2/5 has to be less than 5/10. It is a half of a fifth away.” The NEXT student volunteered and placed 3/8 overlapping just the edge of the 2/5 card on the left. I was expecting percentages to come out, since that was their most recent work with those fractions, however the student said they knew 3/8 was an 1/8 from a half and 2/5 was a 1/10 from a half and an 1/8 and 1/10 are close but an 1/8 is just a little bit further away. Awesome and definitely not what I expected!
  2. I wish I had not put the zero so far to the left. Looking back I am wondering if that instills misunderstandings when they begin their work with negative numbers on a number line similar to the original misconception that launched the activity with the 1 7/8.
  3. Oh, the 100% card….complete mistake on my part, although it may have been a great mistake to have! In the first class, the student with the 100% card came up and said, “I have 100% and that is 100/100 which is 1” and put it in the appropriate place on the line. Just as she did that, I started thinking how I never really thought about the distinct difference between percent in relation to area (like the grids they had been shading) and 100% when dealing with distance on a number line. No one seemed to notice and since I didn’t know exactly what to ask at that point because I was processing my own thoughts, I waited until another student placed 4/4 on top of it and erased it from my immediate view!
    • I stayed for the next class and this time I was prepared for that card and now really looking around to see what students’ reactions were when it was placed. As soon as the student placed it at the 1 location, I heard some side whispers at the tables. I paused and asked what the problem was and they said, “100% is the whole thing.” The next student who volunteered had the 2 card, picked up the 100% card on the way to the right side and put the 2 down and the 100% on top. Lovely and just what I was thinking.

I have never had students reflect on the difference of talking about percentages with distance versus area because I had never thought about it! It definitely feels like an interesting convo to have and a great mistake that I am glad I made!!

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I will be back in another 5th grade class tomorrow and will see what happens…it could make for a great journal writing!

-Kristin

Fraction/Percent Equivalents

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It goes without saying that I miss talking 5th grade math with my students each day. But I am so lucky this year to have a new, wonderful teacher in 5th grade who lets me plan and teach some lessons with her! This lesson was one of her first lessons of Unit 4, Name That Portion.

Since in 4th grade the students do a lot of work with comparing fractions, we designed a Number Talk string in which students were comparing two fractions. We wanted to hear how they talked about the fractions. In the string we used a set with common denominators, common numerators, and one unit from a whole. On each problem we were excited to hear talking about the “size of the piece” being the unit and the numerator telling us how many of those pieces we have. Our 4th grade teachers really do a beautiful job with this work. They also used equivalents to have common denominators to compare and a few used percents, since they had done a some grid work with that they day before.

We started the lesson by asking them how they could shade 1/4 on a 10×10 grid. The majority of the students split the grid in half vertically and then again horizontally and shaded one quadrant. We heard a lot of the “1/4 is half of a half.” As I was walking around, I heard a pair talking about shading a 5×5 in that grid. I saw this as a beautiful connection to the volume unit they just completed in which they were adjusting dimensions and seeing the effect on the volume. I had her explain her strategy and wrote 5 x 5 under the 10 x 10 that was up on the board already and asked how that could get us 1/4 of the whole thing? One student said it looks like it should be half of it because 5 is half of 10, but then one student said since we were taking 1/2 of both it would be a fourth….this is where I hope Leigh (the 5th grade teacher) and I remember to use this when they hit multiplication of fractions!

They then worked in pairs to shade 1/8 and 3/8 and we came back to discuss. We noticed as we walked around that the shading was wonderful on their papers, but when asked to write the fraction and percent, most were blank. I remember this lesson from last year during decimals where the same thing happened. So, we asked them what they thought the fraction was as we got these three answers…

12 r4/100

12 1/2/100

12.5/100

They were not overly comfortable with any of them so we asked them to journal which one “felt right” to them and why…

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We loved to see what they knew about decimal fraction relations, but we especially liked the “it sounds more fifth grady to use 12.5.”

-Kristin

#IntentTalk Chapter 1

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Since it was a bit too much for me to continually tweet, I decided to do a quick blog at lunch!

Principle 1: Discussions Should Achieve a Mathematical Goal

The first week of school my mathematical goals revolve around discussions about students’ mindset in terms of math, as well as the mathematical practices. I found this year that Talking Points and one of the tasks I found on Fawn’s blog fostered those goals. I blogged about it here. My tables are all arranged in groups and the students know from the very first day that discussions will be a huge part of our work together.

Principle 2: Students Need to Know What and How to Share

To support this in my classroom at the start of the school year, I have the students agree upon our class norms. They originate after doing a Number Talk together and reflecting on what we expect as a group during our discussions. I reference these norms throughout the course of the school year.

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Principle 3: Teachers Need to Orient Students to One Another and the Mathematical Ideas

I find a lot this happens during our Number Talks and in then daily in our journal reflections. This is such a focus on my planning of questioning. Asking things such as, “Can you re-explain their thinking in your own word?” or “Did something ____ say change your mind about that way you were thinking?”

Principle 4: Teachers Must Communicate That All Students Are Sense Maker and That Their Ideas are Valued

I think this principle emerges during our very first round of Talking Points of the year when the students my go around their circle with no commenting from others. It allows students the opportunity to speak their ideas without judgement or comment. Being able to change their response on the second round, lets the group know that as we make sense of problems and listen to others, we change our mind, just as we do when we make errors. The freedom I see in their journal entries also reinforces the idea that I value their thinking and know that there is reasoning behind everything they write and do in my class.

“Talk is an important way to build that sense of community and to help children grapple with important mathematical ideas.”

-Kristin

Last Day of Math Class :(

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Today was the last official day I had my students for math. It was a bit sad for me and it was nice to hear some of them say it was “kinda sad” for them too. In moving into a K-5 Math Specialist position next year, I know it will not be the same experience watching a group of students grow over the course of the school year.  It will be great in different ways, but I am really appreciating all of the amazing work my students have done this year.

So…what to do on the last math day after they just had field day yesterday followed by our PBS bowling field trip tomorrow? It is a tough planning!

I first had them look through their two math journals, one from the first half of the year and one from the second half. As their last writing piece, I asked them to write things they noticed in their work over the course of the year after looking through their journal. I only had time to grab one journal today because the end of the year craziness is kicking in, but I plan on following up with a more detailed post later. This one was so powerful and truly gave me goosebumps….

IMG_0955_2After they finished that, I asked them to revisit some of the claims they had written over the course of the year and see if they still thought they were true and could be proven or were not true and needed to be revised. This student had written a claim that when you are multiplying fractions, you could multiply the numerator and denominator to get your answer. As he was proving it just worked for multiplication, he stumbled upon the realization that it worked for division as well. He then worked through a few more division problems and it was such an amazing explanation!

He revised his claim…

IMG_0956_2IMG_0957_2I promise to follow up with some really amazing work they did on the last day when summer is here and there is a chance to breathe 🙂

-Kristin

Patterns and Perseverance

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Today in math was a test in perseverance. The students were working on the growth pattern of an animal called the Fastwalker. It was fairly easy for them to complete up to the 10th year, graph it and answer the questions regarding the line they graphed. The book did not require them to do any generalizing of a rule, however they had other plans! Here is a completed table of one of my students:

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We worked on this up until lunch, discussed the line and how it was different than the constant rate of change graphs we had seen earlier. They kept asking if there was a rule for this one, so I asked them to play around with it and see what they thought. One of the students noticed that if you added all of the terms before with the term number you were trying to find, it gave her the height, so she started adding to see if it worked for the 100th term (nothing like starting small:).

IMG_0826While she was working on adding, another student, who had done a consecutive sums task earlier in the year in RTI w/me, realized there was an easier way to add those numbers, and you can see on the top of the page where he started playing around with pairing up the numbers:

IMG_0823It was so interesting to see the groups working with them and asking questions as they tried different ideas. The two of them finally saw that pairing up the numbers was working and began to generalize based on what they had done with the numbers. It was awesome because they began generalizing based on an even or odd number term because of the pairings and needing to divide the term number by 2. At the bottom of the first paper earlier in this post, you can see she wrote an even and odd rule for the pattern, while this student realized that if should work with even and odd because the decimal didn’t make a difference.

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IMG_0828Shew…..they were sooo proud of themselves (and I was so proud of them) at the end of all of this hard work! The student who did the paper above said, “Wow, that one problem took us almost two hours!” And it was SO worth it to see the accomplishment on their faces. THIS is the reason we must make time for students to investigate their own mathematical curiosities and give them the time they need to persevere through these problems!

-Kristin

Growth Patter Number Talk….3rd Times a Charm

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Over the past couple of days, with my homeroom, I have tried a few strings of numbers to bring out the different ideas that are important when thinking about growth patterns and finding any term in a sequence, Here and here. Both days brought out many great ideas, conversations, and disagreements, however I couldn’t help but feeling the ideas we talked about in two days, could have been achieved in one and felt a little more connected. I knew it was completely the way I posed the problems, so when my second class came in yesterday, after missing a couple days of math due to testing, I was excited to try and adjust my previous work.

Apologize for the messy board, but I still cannot seem to get a handle on that recording thing…

I started with having a student count by 6’s and wrote that in blue. I stopped them at 4 because I was asking about the 10th term and wanted to see if some would figure our 5th and double. I think that is an interesting thing to think about when the start is different so I wanted it up there. I asked 10th term? 60. Ways to get there? 6 x 10 and, unlike my prediction of doubling 30, one student said 24 x 2 because two group of 4 of them is 8 and then two more 6’s (12) is added to that to make 60. I asked 100th term? 600. 2,000th term? 12,000. I asked them how they were getting those without counting and I got “I did 6 times 100” “I did 6 x 2000” and then one student said you could do any number by multiplying it by 6. I asked how he wanted to write that and I wrote that in green. Another student, who has done Visual Patterns with me in our RTI group, said, “We can also write that as 6 times n = Answer.” I asked them to turn and talk to a neighbor if they thought that meant the same thing. We had all yeses and I had some student prove it. I did the same thing with 8’s and wrote that in orange. They started using “A” for “Answer.”

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After that, I asked them to to count by 3’s starting with 6 and stopped them at 15… Asked for the 10th term and got, as expected, 30 and 33. Then the conversation took off with proofs and some really important ideas that was hoping would emerge. I love it when the class is practically divided in half on an answer, we had the 30’s and the 33’s. I asked a 30 to explain how he got the answer and he quickly said 3 x 10=30. I saw a lot of agreement, so I asked for a 33 to share their reasoning. A student said that we “need the beginning number, three, to find out where the tenth one is. 3 x 10 is 30 but then you started three ahead of that so you add 3 to 30.” I wrote that down on the board.

A student then said something that made me have a realization, “It shouldn’t change because you are still doing 10 jumps of 3, so it HAS to be 30. 33 is 3 x 11.” In my last class I had a student who kept insisting that the 10th term remain the same no matter where we started and I could not figure out what they were trying to articulate. NOW, I understand. 30 will always be the distance between wherever we start in the sequence and the 10th term, but not the tenth from the true beginning. AH HA!

IMG_0774_2So, the beginning number was suddenly becoming very important and articulating “10th term from where” was having students agreeing that the 10th term starting from the 6 was going to be 33 but when thinking about a rule for the pattern we needed the true beginning. We were just about to head back to our desks to continue our work when a student (different than the one who had originally said it) said that we could write this one “3 x n + 3 = A” because you have to “add the three you are missing from the beginning to get the answer.” I had them turn, talk and try a few terms out and see what they thought. It was all wrapping up nicely (I was excited about it) when another student said, “You could also write 6 + (3 x n) since you are starting at 6” ….oh goodness, they just don’t ever let it end and I love it:) A disagreement arose that it would have to be “6 + (3 x n -3) because of that extra jump of 3 to start at 6.”

I always hate to say that time got the best of me, but I had missed this group for 2 days of math and I saw this conversation going lonnnnng so I had them write those ideas down in their journal to kick off our class on Monday!

I love when I have the chance to refine ideas that don’t go exactly as I had hoped they would, especially when I know it was completely how I posed the problem or asked the question. After a couple days of talks not connecting as I hoped they would, third time was a charm!

-Kristin

Growth Patterns – Number Talk Attempt…

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After Tuesday’s talk, I wanted to continue having the students look for patterns within sets of numbers. They found it really easy to find any future term in our last talk because our starting term was the change value. For example, they knew the 10th term when counting by 3’s and starting at 3 was as easy as multiplying 3 x 10. I was curious how they would think about predicting future terms if the series did not start with the same number they were by which they were counting. I brainstormed a few possible strings students could begin to think about this and, if time went well, they could look for connections between:

IMG_0772I decided on the following three series:

12, 18, 24, 30….

12, 15, 18, 21…

6, 11, 16, 21….

In each one I was going to have them figure the 10th term and discuss ways they were thinking about it. The idea that I wanted to emerge is the importance of accounting for the number at which they were starting and I also wanted to see how they made their predictions. I was going to end the talk by asking what the graphing story would look like if the first term was a starting height and it continued growing at this rate to connect back to our graphing stories from the previous day. As it sometimes happens, I did not make it as far as I had hoped because some amazing conversations were happening in the very first set of numbers.

I had a student count by 6’s while I recorded, starting at 12 and stopped him after I wrote 30 on the board. I purposefully stopped there because I was curious to see if students would think about the next (5th term) and double to find the 10th as they did the day before. There was an overwhelming agreement for 72 for that exact reason, but since I got a few different answers for the 10th term, I wrote them all on the board and the proving, agreeing and disagreeing began. There was one, lone 66.

There were two proofs for 72:

– Found the 5th term as 36 and doubled it to get the tenth term.

– Did 6 x 10 to get tenth term but then added 12 because he started at 12. I was excited to see he was acknowledging where the series started and the idea of the start being important.

The lone 66, then did a simple continuous count to the 10th term proving that it would be 66. Heads tilted and eyes squinted. I realized at that moment how much I appreciated that the students looked for ways to think about the 10th term without having to count up to it, but also realized that we needed to do a little more work in thinking about what was happening in the sequence.

Since I knew I was not making it past this series of numbers, I decided to connect this set of numbers to a set in which the start was 6. I wrote them on top of each other:

12, 18, 24, 30……

6, 12, 18, 24…..

It then became clear to most that the first set’s 10th term had to be 6 ahead of the bottom one because of the start. The idea of term number and the increase from term to term started to emerge. One student said the bottom series “started one term earlier so it has to end 6 earlier than the top one.” Another student bounced off of that with “A term is 6, right?”

The debate continued and great ideas were coming out about what being the 1st term meant and then one student (the 66) said well it has to be right because (the term number +1) x 6 works for every one of them. That threw most kids for a loop and definitely not a place that I thought most of the class would be ready to engage in conversation around. I let a few students question what he meant, and I let him answer them. The biggest disconnect for students was how the term number factors into finding the number in future terms. To them the term number was just labeling and not really relevant in the values.

It was time to move into our lesson for the day and I was happy with the ideas that were emerging so I had them go back to their journals and do a quick 3 minute writing of either: what they noticed between the two, what someone else said that cleared up something for them, or something they were confused about still. It was interesting to see the word “group” popping up when that really didn’t come up in the talk…

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The “R” was my writing on the board….the SMARTBoard jumped and my 2 looked a bit like an R…they would not let it go of course:)

IMG_0752_2IMG_0754_2IMG_0755_2IMG_0759_2and of course there is always one that I want to find more about because it seems nothing like what the others thought about..

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After this talk, we went into some pattern building with rectangular arrays and finding the nth term. So much to write about that too, but will have to save that work for another night!

Tomorrow, I want to go back to second number talk set I had intended to do today and see how the conversation builds on our thoughts from today. Do they think about the starting number now? Do they talk about the numbers as “terms”? I think I will have them journal about what they find is most important when predicting what future terms would be in the series.

-Kristin

Growth Patterns…the Beginning

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It is finally here, our last unit of the year and I have to say I am so excited to make it to Growth Patterns! Before we did some reorganization of units due to CCSS shifts, I could never get to this unit, however now having fewer units, I finally make it to the end!

If you have never looked at this Investigations unit before, here is a brief description:

1This unit is really a beautiful culmination of all of the pattern noticings my student do all year long.

Being the end of the year, I know I am going to miss constantly having a class to try out my ideas on during the course of the summer, so I am making the most of the time I have left to test some different number routines.  After reading through this unit, two things jumped out at me that could potentially be incorporated into our number routine work before the lesson: predicting nth terms and relationships between two sets of numbers. So, I thought it may be interesting to do some counting and then think about relationships between our sets we make.

I first had a student count by 3’s four times: 3,6,9,12…. I asked the 10th term and everyone looked at me like I was crazy because this seemed too simple and said “30.” I asked how they knew and immediately thumbs went up and they all agreed that 3 x 10 = 30.I asked for another way you could get there? Next I got, “If you add one more 3 and get 15, you can just double it because it is doing the same thing all the way.” I wrote (12 + 3) x 2 = 30. Another student said, “You can double/half and do 5 x 6 = 30.” Me, “How does double/halving look here?” Silence for a minute, so I asked them to chat with a neighbor and then they came to thinking about jumps on a number line and explained that you were doing jumps twice as big so you need half as many.

Next I did the same process with 4’s: 4, 8, 12, 16 and I got much of the same as above. I asked if we could make any connections to the first set. I had an idea this one may be tough (but I had a plan for it in the next set), however I did have two students who noticed it was one more every time you counted by 4’s, so by the time you counted 10 times, you would have to add 10 to your total, 30+10=40.

The third problem, I wanted to give them the chance to make some connections to the 3 and 4 counts, so I did 12’s: 12, 24, 36, 48… Again, I got many of the above strategies, but then they made some connections to doing “3 times as many jumps of 4 in 12” and “4 times as many jumps of 3 in 12” and adjusting their 10th terms.

Because some students were really comfortable moving between the sets of numbers, others were still staying within one set of numbers in describing the 10th term, I gave them two sets to go back to their journal to reflect on: 2’s: 2, 4, 6, 8…. and 2/3’s:  2/3, 4/3, 6/3, 10/3….

I asked them to either talk about how they could arrive at the 10th term or make a connection to one of the previous sets of numbers…

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It was interesting to see their connections between the sets, but I think for next time I need to think more about either the predictions of future terms or comparing two sets, this was a bit too much at once. Next time I may have them look at sets with constant change but not starting at a multiple of that number….and then as I was typing that, I think it would be cool to come up with a set with a missing number at the end that could be varying numbers depending on how they see the pattern, then give a term after the missing number and narrow it down to which pattern it actually is….hmmmm…have to think more about this one…

-Kristin