September 6th, 2008

September 6th, 2008

The students worked on the previous activity and when most had it solved we talked about it.

The kids really enjoyed this activity and we got talking about division, odd and even numbers, number patters, adding, mental math as they dove right into the problem solving method. I introduced the notion of being stuck and the importance of recognizing when you are stuck. I explained that being stuck is a great thing, as it is only here that you are able to assess why you are stuck and look at the possible things you can do to become unstuck, and then learn how to get out of it. Today getting unstuck meant trying to understand what the question was asking, the first stage of problem solving and to figure out what two facing pages really meant.

The second activity I did (and is still on-going) revolves around students getting the concept of big numbers. I posed the question and asked if it was possible, if we started now, to create a paper chain with one million links before school closed in June. Of course, they all laughed and looked at me strange and stated that it was possible. We then took a closer look into this problem. As a class, we looked at and solved a number of questions, which to my surprise, covered many outcomes. We investigated things such as finding out how many sheets of paper we would need, (division) how many packs of paper (division, multiplication and number patterns), estimate how long it would take us, how long the chain would be, how many times it could go around the school, where to store it (volume and capacity) how much it will weigh, and how we are going to keep track of how many links are in the existing chain (they decided to write the number of each link - writing big numbers).

I thought this was pretty cool! The kids were engaged and excited and they wanted to know the answers to these questions which made my job a little easier as I did not have to put a fire under their bottoms to get them going! Hey, maybe this will not be so bad after all.