Cosmas Student Work Week 6

This past week during 1^st grade math we covered number stories and word problems.  This was a lesson that I anticipated my students to struggle with because I assumed it was new to them since we haven’t covered it in my classroom yet.  I was pleasantly surprised when I had 12 first grade faces looking up at me like “umm this is so easy”.  I began by breaking down that when we read a story problem we need to find what information is important, what the question is asking, and find a way that works best for YOU to solve it.  We talked about different strategies for solving (counting on fingers, drawing pictures, etc).  Before moving to our independent work time we did several classroom examples with slides on the smart board and my students performed really well.

              When we moved onto their independent work, I planned for students to work in pairs to create number stories together.  I made up a template to help each pair construct their number story including a spot for important information, what the question is asking, writing the full number story, and showing two ways to solve this problem.  One pair in particular wrote a wonderful story problem with great examples.  Their number story read, “Jordynn and Mikai went to the store.  They brout(bought) 9 pieces of candy.  They got 1 more how many do I have left?”  They also drew two ways to solve it.  One was a drawing of 9 pennies and then a “+” and one more penny and the other was 10 tally marks. 

              What stood out to me most about their work was how they constructed the question that the problem is looking for, “how many do I have left?”.  They have clearly made an “adding to” addition problem of starting with 9 and adding 1 more, yet they phrase the question like a subtraction problem would be implying we are taking away to ask “how many are left”.  This makes me wonder if I didn’t go into enough detail in my instruction about how to make a question that correlates with what the information in the question is getting at.

 These two students may have just thrown that question on the end because they have heard it before or maybe they really do have a misunderstanding of what the phrase “how many are left” is really getting at.  The Everyday Math curriculum “spirals” around all different concepts by doing a little introduction or adding a small bit to each concept as it arrives.  We will encounter number stories again in the next unit so addressing ways to phrase questions within these stories would be a beneficial thing to cover.  This pair clearly understands the problem they are trying to set up by showing it consistently in their pictures, but the question on the end just doesn’t quite match up to the addition the problem entails.