Most Amazing Math!!!

I've been taking South Dakota Counts through the State of South Dakota. It is an amazing program. The coaches from our district absolutely astound me. I've learned so much on top of learning AVMR. I feel like I've grown as a math teacher and can't even believe my own eyes somedays. 

Are you in for a long post and a lot of explaining? Oh good! Here we go. So, as you know, we had inside recess all week. :( Today we were playing inside and the kids were coloring/making art projects. Our little Jaxon started the whole thing. Have you ever seen those little fans that unfold and you can fan yourself? Kids love those. Well Jaxon knows how to make them and then glue them so they stay together. The ENTIRE class was doing this. They were so into it. 

When we had to clean up they were saying, "Can we make those for all of the kindergarten kids? Can we sell them? Yeah! We could sell them!" I started thinking and was wondering if I could turn what was supposed to be reading time into a crazy math problem/project. So I quickly wrote the above problem down. I told them they could use any tools, work alone or with friends to solve it. 

I was beyond thrilled. This wasn't new. It was hard. No one looked confused or puzzled. They got right to work. Just look below. 

This group used counters. 

These friends used counters and drew tallies. 

This group had an interesting strategy. They were drawing pairs. I asked them why. They couldn't really explain that. I think it kind of 'happened' by mistake. They did explain that each numeral, "1, 2, 3, 4..." stood for one child. Then they counted the total. 

These friends used 10 towers. We recently discovered that these towers were made of 10. Before now, we had just been calling them towers. They need to discover the importance of 10 (a decade number), on their own. Do you see the 20 and 23? Wow. 

I had two friends who explained to me that 20 and 20 is 40. 3 more is 43. These friends clearly have developed a solid place value sense. Great! 

So once we were done solving....we asked, "How did you do it?" Look below. I recorded some of their thoughts as they shared. Notice, I would not record, "I just knew it."

Now it was time to make the fans. I asked the children how we could keep them organized so we know exactly when we had 43. Aryn said we could do groups of 5 or 10 (wow) and the class shouted, "10!" Cale was our "10 captain." He let us know exactly when we were done. 

That's it! We'll deliver our beautiful fans to K01 and K03 tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed this as much as we did!