General Happenings: Mathematicians at Work!

I was able to capture some learning happening at the math table yesterday. Marko and Adem were working on the math challenge for this week which was "How many ways can you make 10?'. I was excited to see their thinking behind it as this is something we haven't taught yet. Watch to see how they bring their previous knowledge of numbers and composing numbers to this week's challenge using our ten frame (not five frame- whoops!) and our rekenrek (abacus).

Using a five frame is incredibly helpful for students. When either the top or bottom row is full, we know that there are automatically 5, which means we can start counting on from 6 (just like we know we will always have 5 fingers, so we don't need to count them!). When there are only 1 or 2 spaces empty, we can count backwards from 10. This activity brings so much learning to life, including ordinal counting (counting correctly from 1 to 10), subitizing (recognizing small quantities instantly), addition, subtraction... the list goes on!

Can your child make 10 in different ways? Does it always have to be with two groups of numbers?