Sunday, January 6, 2013

From my Awesome Math Coach!

Aw my math coach just gave me status!  Love it!



Re: Making Conjectures--Post what you are hearing from students
by Jill Board - Saturday, 5 January 2013, 10:17 AM
 Barb, (and I hope others will read this too!!)

Thanks for giving us a glimpse into your students conjecturing! The more we share our stories the more likely we are to hear student conjectures (or "almost conjectures") every day. (If you can't remember what Barb posted, please go to the forum and read the thread there.)


One part that you wrote was particularly interesting to me. You said:
That's when T. said the number has to end in 4 to be even. I walked the class through breaking 54 into the ten sticks, reminding them that we had already decided that 10's were always even so we didn't have to look at the 5. I asked Z then if he agreed with what T said and he did.
I could just picture how previously your class may have justified the conjecture "If the ones digit is even in a double digit number, then the number is even."

To justify that conjecture, I can imagine that students explored lots of double digit numbers and recognized that tens always can be broken into 5 partnerships of 2. They would have justified that all tens have to be even no matter how many tens are in a double digit number. Then the students could check to be sure that the ones digit was even (or odd) by giving it the partnership test.

When students give a first grade justification (as above) then we can call that conjecture that they made a generalization. It doesn't mean that every child has made sense of the generalization yet, so that is one reason to keep revisiting these big math ideas.

I'm curious: I wonder what T would do with a number that doesn't have 4 in the ones digit...like 0 or 8. Does T think that numbers are only even if they have a 4 in the ones place? More to find out and explore!

So Oak Grove, Lone Pine and ALE teachers.....how are students justifying conjectures in your classrooms? We can be thrilled when we get student conjectures, but we also want to make sure we don't stop there......And sometimes they will show that a conjecture they posed wasn't actually true.........another important idea.

Thanks Barb....Keep on, keep on everyone! See you soon.

Jill

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