But they only have one strategy. Now what?

Vicky gave her Grade 4 class a question relating to their upcoming Curriculum night BBQ.  The students completed a K-W-C chart to help them decode the information from the problem.  Her group of students is very comfortable with problem solving, and was not only able to quickly complete the chart, but also infer things that were in the problem (e.g., we need to remember the number of students in our class - 19).

When the students completed the problem, she noticed that almost everyone used the same strategy - Drawing a picture.  So she wondered how to get them to do things in a different way, perhaps one that is a little more quicker, and shows a bit more understanding of patterns.

Drawings of Tables

These students started to use numbers and pictures

  She got them to talk a little bit about their work in a congress.  As the pairs began to talk, probing questions were asked and that helped them pull out ideas, make connections between their thoughts and their work, and have their thinking challenged.  As the congress was going on, a chart was created to show the different ways that they could have solved the problem.

Vicky also included the statement "The pattern rule is" because she knew from her ONAP pre-assessment that the students were having difficulty in writing out the pattern rule in full using words.  After the chart was made, the students then were posed the question "If you were to do this problem again, what strategy would you use and why?"  There responses were very insightful and meaningful.  The best one was that the student commented on the fact that they would use the number line because then they would be done their work a lot quicker. :)