Today, our students completed the "Day 1" activity. Mrs. Howe and I made a Math Story to share with our classes called The Great Smartie Problem.
After reading the math book together, we had our students work in partners to try and solve the problem presented at the end of the story. It was interesting to see their solutions, and hear what they had to share. All of the groups shared their completed work with the class.
Our Solutions To The Great Smartie Problem on PhotoPeach
Here are some of the observations noted by my students:
1) All but one of the groups used counters to solve this problem. The other group used a reckenreck.
2) Most of the groups thought that there should be 8 Smarties in each bucket, but they came to this conclusion differently. Some students dumped all of the Smarties out of the buckets, and put them back in one at a time. One of the groups, dumped all of the Smarties out of the buckets and put them back in two at a time. Still other groups moved two of the Smarties from the first bucket to the second one.
3) One group decided to buy more Smarties and put an additional four Smarties in the second bucket that had less Smarties than the first bucket.
4) One group decided to just put six Smarties in each bucket and eat the additional Smarties. The children thought that this would be a yummy choice!:)
5) Even though all of the solutions are different ones, all of them make sense, and all of them are well-explained. In all of the cases, the answer is a "fair" one.
We wonder how the students will apply what they did here to the problem that they solve on Wednesday. We would all love to hear your solution to this problem too. Please consider adding a comment here letting us know how you would solve this problem. Thank you for your help with this!
Aviva and Sharon