Tomorrow is the Floor Hockey tournament and there is going to be 357 boys here and 279 girls. How many more boys than girls will there be?
Even though the numbers were small here we were looking to see if they could represent the problem in some way.
We stopped the students after 2 minutes and asked for them to describe their representation. Some students had 357 - 279 written and a few had 357 + 279 written, but again there were not "mathematical graphics" to illustrated what it might look like.
A quick congress to talk about what a 'math graphic' could look like elicited some of the following:
So we decided to pull the grade 1 students and lower the numbers a bit to see what they would come up with. We changed the numbers to be 37 boys and 19 girls; and allowed them a minute...and...they actually solved it each demonstrating a 'counting on' strategy on a number line, however, when we changed the numbers to be ones to big to count on from the students response was that they couldn't do it with those numbers.....
