Buddy Classroom - Math

My friend and colleague is a Kindergarten teacher at my school. Although we have a ridiculous mobility rate (to wit: two students still haven't returned from their yearly trip to Mexico; one student who just came here from Egypt - Egypt! - in October is now leaving because her family found a place to live in a neighboring district; and I have a new student starting Monday from the Philippines. And that's just this week!), there is still a good chunk of my students who had her for Kindergarten the year before last. And a handful have siblings in her class right now.

A couple of months ago, we wrote them a big poster letter:

 "Dear Room 1, There are 2 ducks in the pond. Then 3 ducks came to the pond. We want to give every duck 2 peanuts.  How many peanuts do we need? We need your help! Please! Please! Please help us solve this problem! Love, Room 29

My students delivered the poster to their former teacher, and her students solved the problem by acting it out. She video taped the entire activity, from them making sense of the problem, to figuring out who should be a duck in the pond, to what should they use for "peanuts", to counting (correctly, then incorrectly, then correctly) the number of peanuts they needed to solve the problem. 

She sent the video back to me. And then I died. It is 9 minutes and 48 seconds of YES. I laughed the whole time I watched it, and I still do. It's just too good. It's hard to pick a favorite part, but watching them decide what to use as "peanuts" has got to be up there.

Teacher: Okay, so we have our ducks in the pond, what do they need now?

Them: More water! 

Teacher: Let's read the story again (reads it to them) What do they need?

Them: Peanuts!

Teacher: But we don't have any peanuts, what can we use instead?

Montrell: How about peanuts?

Teacher: But we don't have any peanuts, is there something we can use to pretend?

Elmer: We could use popcorn!

Teacher: Well, let's look at the problem, is it popcorn or peanuts?

Them: PEANUTS!!!

Teacher: Right, but we don't have any peanuts...is there something else we can use? ....maybe something in this classroom that we can pretend is a peanut?....maybe some math manipulative that could be a peanut?

Girl: How about those blocks?

Teacher: (sweating) Ok! So show us what that would look like....

Here are my students watching the video of her kids solving the problem. Along with the video, they sent a poster letter back asking us a math question too. Their question was "How do you make five?" Haha! I love them!


At first, both the Kinder teacher and I worried that it wasn't problematic enough for my 2nd graders, but it turned out it was a great question for them. We played a game of "Shake and Spill" using cups of 5 yellow/red counters. The game and the recording of how the counters landed wasn't terribly difficult for them (but it was exceedingly fun!) so our problem solving experience focused on how they could prove that they had ALL the ways, and this included making sense of the commutative property (is 2 yellows + 3 reds the same as 3 reds and 2 yellows?). They made a poster of their findings, and we sent it back to Kindergarten with a video of us playing the game and proving we have all the ways.

We are loving this way of doing Buddy Math! All of our students are working on the things that are grade level appropriate, and that are truly problematic for them, but they are still experiencing the excitement of working together through the letters and the videos.

{LOVE}