First Grade Tries to Challenge Us!

So Mrs. Runyan's friend, Cohen, came to deliver a math problem to our class today. The first graders are working on writing their own problems. Here it is:

Rosa went to the store to buy 4 toy cars. Max bought 6 toy cars. How many do they have in all?

Well, take a look below! I only had 4 who got stumped on it, so we're asking for a harder question!

Snap Cube Fun

I constructed some snap cube towers today and the kids had to make the EXACT same copy of them. It was super fun! They were using a lot of mathematical language and I saw them counting to figure it out. Some children would lay the cubes on top of each other to match it.

Haleigh almost has it! Then she worked at it a little longer and got it :)

Jorgia and Isabel were quite the team. Jorgia was helping by telling Isabel to 'add 1 more', etc.

Happy Tuesday!

You can read the problem above. This is today's problem. I was really happy to see so many of them organize their thoughts and choose what tools to use. Many could figure this out without looking at the shapes...but for some kiddos who can't identify the shapes, they needed to hold the manipulatives and count the faces.

Look at Bryson's work! Amazing. He drew 4 dots for the 4 faces of each cylinder and 3 dots for the 3 faces of the 3 cones. Simple and fast for him. OH and I almost forgot! Bryson amazed me even more. He says, "4+3 is 7 and I know that because 3+3 is 6, so it's 1 more." What unbelievable thinking! He is thinking about numbers in a relational way.

Okay. This amazed me too. We have our first table ever in kindergarten! Mahlaya didn't even mean to make a chart, she just chose to organize her work this way. The 3/2/1 on top stand for the number of shapes and the numbers below represent the number of faces. WOW!

Here is Aryn's work. Again, she understands what the plus symbol means...yet you should remember that this is not age appropriate for all students. I challenged Aryn to write the corresponding number sentence and she did that in a snap. (look below)

 

I also love how they're starting to record their thinking with words.

3D shapes

You've all sent in great shapes for our 3D shape museum! Thank you! Today we sorted them and talked about the shapes as we did so.

This little shape didn't have a home. Is it a pyramid? Hm. Nope. That's what they decided. Since a rectangular prism can be cut into pieces and retain it's same shape, the class decided to call this a triangular prism.

Investigating with 3D shapes. Will they roll, stack or slide?

Try to click on this picture to see some of the GREAT thinking we had. Read what Cale and Katie had to say at the bottom.

Fun Math Problems!

So last week we did had this wonderful celebration to say goodbye to winter. I posted some pictures of the math problem we did. I decided that we needed to do one more problem based on the snowballs....so I made it a harder problem type.

Ryken made 5 snowballs for his snowfort.

His friends saw this and wanted to make some too.
Ryken had them make more snowballs until the snowfort had 15 snowballs in all.
How many snowballs did his friends make?

I was amazed to see how they naturally used the 5 groups. This is truly showing an understanding of a group. This child can see that it's one group of 5. That's a REALLY hard concept for K.

This child is showing an understanding of the plus sign as well. This is also a VERY hard concept for K. The children worked in teams. They still have a long ways to go with this. Think back to the 8 Standards of Mathematical Practice from the report card. They have to discuss mathematical thinking with others. It's funny to see what many of them do. I can put them in a team, yet many end up solving it in their own way and not discussing. We have our best discussions as a whole group.

Katie amazed me with her work. She drew 15 snowballs and numbered them. Then she got stuck. I helped her a little bit by rereading the question over and over. Then she wrote a 1 above the 6 and kept going. Can you figure out how she did this?

You won't be surprised to see that many kiddos were added to our....

 

How did you do it wall!!!!