As I mentioned in my last post, number talks lately have felt a little off in my classroom. My new student has changed our classroom dynamic a little bit, and I don’t feel that I’ve been doing a good job choosing problems that are accessible for all my students.
So for today’s number talk I revisited addition–specifically a problem that uses the “round and adjust” strategy mentioned in “Making Number Talks Matter”. Previous units have worked on both rounding and addition and (to me) it seemed like a very natural strategy when adding -9 numbers.
So here was my plan, including a few expected student strategies:
And here are the results! You can see that I’m not super great at predicting the strategies my students will use, and absolutely 0 of them volunteered the strategy I was aiming for of “round and adjust. I always really love listening to them and their explanations though.
A few strategies I’d like to highlight:
-S has been a really reluctant participant in number talks this year (this was his first time to share a strategy!) and I was incredibly pleased that he volunteered to share his thinking with us. He started by finding the double 9 +9 in the problem, and then added on the 4 he took from 13 to make the second 9. He clearly articulated his thinking to the class and was even able to take on some questions. A few students were unsure of where he got the 4 from that he added on to the 18. Having another student re-explain his strategy was a great teaching moment for the class.
-My strategy! After seeing that none of my students had used the strategy that I was aiming for, I decided to speak up and offer another way of seeing the problem. I’m so glad that I did! As soon as I said “Well, I knew that 9 was really close to 10…” many kids piped up and said “You rounded!”. After going through the rest of my idea, one student had a question for me about why I needed to subtract the 1 after I had added on 10. We spent a few minutes discussing where that -1 came from and I feel that at the end of our conversation he was a little more clear about it.
Overall I was really satisfied with our number talk today. I had many students anxious to participate with accurate strategies, which tells me I did a better job picking an accessible problem. So where do I go from here? I think that I definitely want to try out another addition problem tomorrow that lends itself to “round and adjust”. I am anxious to see if my student who questioned me about it today is able to try it out on his own tomorrow.
December 17, 2015 at 4:27 pm
There are times when I think I am predicting what the student’s will say, and they don’t. Sometimes I am thrilled with what they do come up with and other times I am disappointed. I too have suggested strategies from time to time with my different Intervention groups. I think I need to make some anchor charts. It only gets better, right:)
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