Recording and Posting Key Ideas

Goal 1 - Ways to Make 5 with Part-Part-Whole Grids

Recording and Posting Key Ideas

As you and your students are sharing math ideas and strategies, it can be really helpful to create a permanent record of the key concepts, relationships, and strategies.  With these records posted on your walls, your students can reference them as often as needed until they become permanent memories.

Addition/Subtraction Focus:

As you're working on Goals 1 and 3 (Ways to make 4/5 and Ways to make 10), one concrete way to engage students is to have them stand in groups and move! 

[If the video clip below is blocked by your district's web filter, 
a more district-friendly version is available at TPR Ways to Make Five.]

This TPR activity can help students organize their thinking.  When you make charts to record the facts, you and your students can talk about the patterns.  

Once you have developed the chart with your students, you can incorporate it into your daily routine with a choral chant.   You can hide the bottom row and have the students say together "5 equals 0 + 5, 5 equals 1 + 4, ...".

You can also invite pairs of students to practice together in their spare time if you give them post-its to hide the bottom row.

Multiplication/Division Focus:

Even though students may already know and believe the Commutative Property for addition, it's important to focus on this idea when you start working with multiplication.  To make it really relevant to students, you can use word problems such as the ones below.

In this example, students can see that 4 groups of 10 (4 children each making 10 cards) generates the same product as 10 groups of 4 (10 children each making 4 cards).  You can record this in multiplication factor-factor-product grids too.

... and a special thanks to the

 teachers and students 

who created the charts used in this post!