Suppose there are 40 bird families in Tucson. A bird family consists of a Mom Bird, a Dad Bird, and 2 kids birds. 18 bird families fly away to Phoenix. How many kid birds are left in Tucson?
Allow me to list the mathematical practices that this task required:
MP1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
MP 2 Reason abstractly and quantitatively
MP 3 Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
MP 4 Model with mathematics
MP 5 Use appropriate tools strategically
MP 6 Attend to precision
MP 7 Look for and make use of structure
MP 8 Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning
Huh. I honestly didn't know I would list out all eight. Oh well! If the shoe fits...
My group of three girls made me so proud! They're getting used to (finally!) my persistent questioning and demands that they represent their work in multiple ways. With little prompting, here are some pictures of what they came up with.
Similarly, Student B (let's say, Anna) showed represented the situation similarly, but didn't even draw the two "adult" dots since she said they didn't matter. She had more difficulty counting the two dots, so she grouped the families to keep track of how many bird kids she was counting.
Lastly, Student C ("Danielle"), was able to identify the first step as "subtraction," but struggled at first with picturing the situation. She came up with "22" but couldn't identify if that was bird of bird families. After a group discussion, she decided that there were 22 bird families left. In order to figure out how many kids that was, she made the chart and continued it onto 3 whiteboards (not pictured).
