Problem Solving

The kids have been doing a great job at problem solving!  At this point in the year, the focus is on understanding the problem and the ability to pick a strategy and try it.  Later in the year we will work on writing number sentences to match the story problems.
 I used circles to prove how I got my answer, but your child may chose a way that works for them.  Some children like to put the circles in a ten frame to visually see the numbers and other like to use a number line to show their thinking.  The use of any of these strategies is fine as long as your child is understanding what the problem is asking.  If your child is confused using a ten frame or number line encourage them to try using circles to illustrate what the problem is asking.

The most challenging problems are the put together and take apart problems.  These problems involve decomposing numbers instead of adding more or taking some away.

Three red apples and two green apples are on

the table. How many apples are on the table?

 

 

In the problem above, your needs to understand that they are putting the pieces together to get a total number.


Another problem type involves your child decomposing a number into two parts, where you know one of the parts:

Five apples are on the table. Three are red and

the rest are green. How many apples are

 

green?

 

In order to solve the problem above, your child needs to draw the total and then understand that they are splitting the total apart.  One common misconception is that children draw the 5 apples and then draw 3 more.  If this happens, ask your child if you are adding more apples to the table?  Most of the time, once they stop and think about it they realize they are not adding more, but instead of splitting the apples into two groups (red and green). 

 

 

 

The last put together/take apart problem type is the hardest for adults to understand because we are use to having only 1 correct answer and this problem type has multiple correct answers.

 

 

Grandma has five flowers. How many can she put in

her red vase and how many in her blue vase?

 

 

In this problem type, your child needs to understand how to decompose numbers into two parts.  They can pick any possible way to decompose the total number and will have a correct answer. 

 

I hope this is helpful as we continue problem solving throughout the year. 

 

1st Grade Authors

We have been working hard during writers workshop!  Check our some of our wonderful stories!  We have been working on our writing stamina, telling a small moment story, making our stories come to life (dialogue, movement, feelings and thoughts) and being brave spellers!  George McClements has been teaching us many different craft moves that we have tried in our own writing!  Be on the look out for pop out words, ellipses, and exact actions!

The next few weeks, we will continue to make our stories come to life by adding more details as well as beginning to edit our stories and check for correct punctuation, capitalization and making sure our word walls words are spelled correctly.  All of your child's small moment stories will come home at the end of our unit!  Stop by the hallway outside our room to see even more stories on display!

 

Ice Cream Graphs

 

On Friday, we had a surprise in math class!  What better way to kick off a graphing lesson then to have a taste test!  We tasted three different kinds of ice cream and each child chose their favorite and wrote it on a post-it note.

 

 

 

Once our data was collected, we discussed as a class if there was a better way to display it so we could easily see what flavor had the most votes. 

 



 

After a few different suggestions (put them into a pattern, sort them into groups...), we realized that if we lined our data up, we were able to see easily which flavor had the most/least votes.

 



 

Everyone was excited to see that we had created our first graph!  We used our data to create a class graph of our favorite ice cream flavors!  We also discovered bar graphs can go either direction and the data doesn't change!

 

After creating our class ice cream graph, we were busy collecting data for another graph!  We counted how many desks and doors (including cabinet doors) were in our room.  We turned our data into a bar graph and discovered there are more doors then desks in our classroom!

 

Our next graphing adventure will involve tally charts and picture graphs!  Keep up the great work mathematicians!