While our focus is to help students develop specific skills in maths, such as multiplication or decoding story problems, one of my overarching goals is for students to play with math. I love the website YouCubed, because it offers so many activities that show the open, visual, and creative nature of maths. This week students worked on the following challenge to help them experience this for themselves:
You have three colored blocks: red, blue, and yellow. You have to combine three colors to make a tower. How many different towers can you make? At first, everyone agreed, “This is so easy, 1!” Then after a minute, “No, wait, three.” Then, the class became quiet as everyone worked on paper or with manipulatives, exploring combinations of towers. Once everyone reached the conclusion that you could make 6 different towers using these three colors, we met as a group to discuss strategies about how we each arrived at this answer. Some students used an outline of three-block towers and worked systematically, using colored pencils to color a yellow block in each outline, then a blue block in another space, then the last open space with red. Others worked with Unifix cubes and explained that they tested how many towers they could make with blue on top and found that this was only two, and then did the same thing with red and yellow colors.
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