Normally, I like to give an overview of the entire day, but today is a little different. While we did a number of amazing things (like designing cities and working on our super secret magical ornaments), I was absolutely blown away by their work on the problem of the day and wanted to focus just on that today. Let’s go.
We started with an already challenging problem, with Teddy wanting to make 3 cookies for each of his 4 friends. Sokrates started by asking me to reread the question, just to make sure that it was just for Teddy’s friends, not for Teddy too. Teddy immediately started skip counting by 3s, as he knew each friend would get three cookies. Anja counted on her fingers, going up 3 four times, but it got a little hard to count at the end. Max wanted to draw it out on the board, and Rebecca helped him out by reminding him that they needed 4 friends, not just 3 as he thought at first. Niki drew hers out and realized she could just represent the friends with Xs, instead of drawing out people. Juniper thought at first the answer was 7, but she was comparing her work with Yianni and they worked out that they needed to count to three 4 times, not just add them together, so they ended up deciding it was 12. Honestly, this was impressive enough, as far as mathematical reasoning for K/1 students goes, especially since they did all of this independently. But, since they were doing great, I read them the bonus question. Sadly, after Teddy finished baking, he remembered that there were 2 more friends he wanted to give cookies to. If he couldn’t make any more cookies but wanted to share them evenly, how many would each friend get. Timo estimated it would be about 2, since he figured they would need to get less than the 3 they originally got because there are more people to share with (this is a fascinating bit of mathematical reasoning). Paolo thought we could check it out by first drawing the now 6 friends Teddy’s going to be sharing with. Tove reasoned that we would then pass out the 12 cookies we figured out from the previous answer to the friends. After we did one round, Gia saw that we had passed out 6 cookies and could go another round. In the end, it turned out that each of Teddy’s friends got 2 cookies. What an incredible mathematical journey and such wonderful young mathematicians.