After an instructional maths group with the teacher, the children are often encouraged to show their learning and practice the skills through an independent task or game. This group has been working on adding and subtracting numbers to 10. These questions are called "change unknown" because they're trying to determine the missing number. They can be tricky to work out! A word problem we might use to accompany these number problems would be something similar to "Miss Russell had 6 lollipops at the start of the day. Now she only has 5 left. How many did she eat?" :)
This group has been learning how to count on to solve addition problems. We have been trying to move from using materials (physically counting our fingers, the numbers, etc) to using imaging, where we count and keep track inside our head. While we were practicing today, two other great strategies were used: "tidy numbers" and using basic facts. "Tidy numbers" is where the smaller number is split to take the biggest number to the nearest 10. For example, 9+5 could be worked out as 9+1+4. A child might use basic facts in a problem like 12+5 because they know 2+5=7, so 12+5=17. When children know the answer to a question, we will always ask "how did you know?", "why do you think that?" or "how did you figure it out?" This builds metacognition (thinking about our own thinking) and benefits others in the group because they can learn from each other. . . .
We read the Big Book "Hairy Bear and the Door". In the story, Hairy Bear needs to build a new door for his house. He says "a house must have a door to stop the wind and the rain." Unfortunately he hits his hand with the hammer and can't build anymore! His wife arranges for his friends to pitch in and finish building it for him. At the end of the week, we posed a building challenge to the Room 3 and 4 students. Can you build a door for Hairy Bear? There were just two parameters: it had to be strong enough to stand up against the wind and strong enough to stand up against the rain. We saw so much creativity in the doors that were built!
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