Mathitis

In my post about Breaking the Cycle I wrote about the terrible sickness that I had in second grade, ‘mathitis’. I had looked for Ms. Breen, my second grade teacher, before, but after writing the post I jumped in whole-heartedly. Some people with the last name Breen probably think I’m crazy from the emails that I sent, but I FOUND HER! She is still teaching, and seemed happy to hear from me. I then found my yearbook from second grade. Here’s my second grade class, and the note that Ms. Breen wrote to me.

It all makes me feel so happy, and finding the teacher that made me want to be a teacher is priceless.

Thanks Ms. Breen!

Another Round of Number Talks

I’ve been doing number talks in a few classrooms around my school. Today I was in a different 3rd grade classroom and tried 39+16 again. This time I planned ahead and thought about their possible responses, partly based on what I observed last month in another classroom.

I planned for a dot number talk as well, just in case we had extra time.

We only got to the number sentence, but they were able to share great strategies! I asked the little girl who had 62 as her answer to share first. She used the number line, but while she was sharing she discovered her mistake – she had started with 39, jumped 10 to 49, then was going to jump 9 more and then 6 more. When she said to jump 9 more, I asked her what number she had started with and she said, “39….Oh! I already used the 9!” So she decided that the jump of 6 was all she needed, and she landed on 55. I loved that she learned from her mistake and wasn’t at all thrown off by it….she just kept right on going. Her teacher obviously has set up a classroom community where learning from your mistakes is encouraged!!

It was interesting that nobody used the first strategy that I had thought of on my plan. Guess they’re just not quite there yet. I’m going to do another number talk in that classroom next week. Should I do the dots that I had planned or another addition problem?