First Problem of the Month for the Year - PART ONE

I have never kicked off Problem Solving Workshop with a Problem of the Month before in my second grade, but I believe in mixing things up and so that's exactly what I did on Thursday.  We did the Primary Version of the POM "Squirreling It Away" first. The Primary Version is one of my favorite ways to start a POM, since it is very often a scaled down version of the Level A and it helps with giving kids access to that first level.

We acted out having 5 acorns, and one squirrel coming. We gave the squirrel an acorn. How many acorns do we have left? We repeated this for 6 acorns and 3 squirrels; 4 acorns and 3 squirrels; 7 acorns and 2 squirrels.

We then retreated to our desks....or whatever various places I'm currently stashing 32 kiddos. From here we did the two-part problem of the Primary Version, where we have 10 acorns and 5 squirrels come up and we give them acorns and then 3 more come and we give them acorns, and the question is then "how many more squirrels can we feed?"  We did this for several combinations (12 acorns to 3 squirrels and then to 4 more squirrels; 9 acorns to 2 squirrels then to 4 squirrels).

I had to remind myself several times that this is what it's like at the beginning of the year. During these early attempts, I can find myself leaning towards answer-getting, towards just getting through the activity... students often approach problem solving work with an intellectual laziness that is frustrating to work around. In order to create the kind of math environment that I want, I stick to my 75% rule...if 24-26 of my kids are paying attention and direct modeling the problems, I just ignore those who are not. I'll get them eventually, I just have to forgive myself if I don't get them ALL the FIRST time out....otherwise I get very cranky. Just saying. If less than three-quarters of my kids are engaged and moving along, I chalk it up to "that's the wrong problem" and we just clean up, no harm no foul, and we try again tomorrow. In this case, really only a handful of students were giving me the blues, so after a quick assessment of who's doing what, I put on my blinders and we soldiered on.

We finished this part on Thursday and I brought them back to the carpet for a quick lesson on what it means to record what we just did with our blocks. We did it with drawings and number sentences, but it was necessarily imperfect since I was relying almost totally on what they could supply.  If I asked, "How could we show that we fed 5 squirrels with these acorns" and they answered, I had to use it. It's the first pass of even opening up the discussion that "this math that we are doing, it looks like something when we write it down" so I'm not worried. We spend all year developing this fully.

Then I went home and took a nap. The end.   :)