Student Work 2/19

I'm sick today, so I didn't go into my placement. But I have a photograph of some math work that I had taken previously:

This task asks how many boys and how many girls there are in the classroom. The students count all the boys, then count all the girls, then add the two together to get the total number of students in the class. Every time a new student joins the class, they do a new equation. At the beginning of the school year there were 18 students in the class, and they now have 24 students, so they have had to do this activity pretty often.

The big idea of this task is to have students add up parts to make up a whole. It is an interactive activity that the class can connect to because it is always interesting for a new student to come to a class. There is only really one way to approach this problem, given the specifics of the task, and that is to simply add the number of boys to the number of girls. But if we wanted to make this task more cognitively demanding, we could use the given equations to make more math equations (e.g., 21-8=13, 24-15=9). And this can lead to students learning the concept of "number families." 

For this task, it is possible that students might add up the numbers incorrectly in their heads, which would lead them to come up with answers that are slightly off. But given their mathematical understanding, most students in the class would be able to correct themselves shortly after.