The thought for this warm up (for me) came about when backwards designing last year and looking more closely at the standards. Especially in the Number Sense strand, students are often asked to Interpret an operation by "describing real-world contexts."
- It allows me to see the types of problems students are comfortable with and they will hopefully show a more variety in their repertoire as the year goes on. Right now, no student is thinking about using area problems when looking at multiplication and division....I hope to see those incorporated as we talk about the distributive property and move in to our Geometry unit.
- I hope it will lead pretty seamlessly into our expressions and equations unit. Students often struggle with writing equations from word problems and I'm excited to see if it makes a difference in this area.
What it looks like...
Thoughts so far...
2. Students struggle modeling division! I was surprised (and I'll admit, kind of excited because we had some great conversation) to see how many students modeled division as multiplication. I'll update the post with some pictures when I take some.
3. I need to be more explicit that the story needs to ask a question. Also, often times the question isn't asking for the right piece of information. Again, I'll try to find some student examples of this. I get so in to the activity, I forget to take pictures. :)