At this point my students are working on fact families and identifying
different ways to arrive at a given answer and identify how numbers are
related. My MT introduced fact families Monday and Mondays homework
included writing addition and subtraction number sentences involving
three numbers. An example was 75, 50 and 25. The students had to write 2
addition number sentences and two subtraction number sentences using
those numbers. Also as a part of the homework, the students had to
choose their own three numbers and create 2 addition number sentences
and 2 subtraction number sentences. The 3rd graders did very well with
this. They understand the concept of fact families and were able
to.create true number sentences when given a set of numbers. On October
16th the students had to again practice writing true number sentences
based on.a family of numbers. In addition this, the worksheet asked the
question " Why is it important to know the basic base 10 addition and
subtraction facts? Students either did not.respond to this question or
wrote something to this effect " so you will know them if someone asks".
I wish that students would have put more effort into answering this question.
A future task that students can do with this concept would be to again
discuss the importantce of knowing fact family information. It is
important that students know why they are learning something. If they
do, they are more likely to internalize the information and are able to recall it at a later date.
I think it's valuable that you asked the question as you did and analyzed the results as you did. Perhaps "Why is it important to know...?" is too vague or general of a question. In fact, I would think of that type of question as being at the grain size of a big idea, e.g., "Why is measurement important?" That's not really a question that you can answer explicitly, but, rather, only one you can explore. So, in the future, you might try to test out questions in your own mind and see whether or not you could answer the question (if you can't explicitly or succinctly answer it, it is probably too "big" of a question). Might you follow up on this lesson by asking students "What do you need to know in order to solve this problem?" (referring to a problem you give them). You can then have students think about their answer and write some ideas down and then compare with each other either in pairs and/or in a whole class discussion.
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