Me: “Hmmm…some of you say 56, and some of you say 11. This is approximately how the conversation went: Instead, I decided to ask the children to sort it out. When I asked them to show me what they’d done, some had come up with 56 (or something close to that) and others came up with 11! Now, here’s where my first instinct would have been to correct and give a review of how to do addition with the Stamp Game. Since I had asked them to bring their Stamp Games to the lesson, that was the obvious way to represent the problem, and that’s what they did. I told them they could draw a picture, create a representation (they didn't know what this was, so note to self: give a lesson on mathematical "representations" before doing this lesson), use a material, or think of a way to solve it in their minds. ![]() So instead of moving on, I asked the children to solve the problem a different way. This question was actually the beginning of a problem from the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, and the point was not to find the correct answer, but to think of different ways of solving the problem. Earlier in my teaching career, I would have said "great, these children can do static addition," checked it off on my lesson list, and moved on. ![]() ![]() If that were the end of it, this would be a really boring blog post, but it's not. First, we calculated this using the usual stack and add method, which no one had any trouble with, and came up with 56. This week, I had a fascinating discussion with some of my students that gave me remarkable insight into their understanding.
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