First of all, a little background to our math at Seabury:
We carefully chose the curriculum Math Connects due to its sound mathematical core. It is the skeleton we use to make sure that we cover the scope and sequence that is foundational to strong mathematical understanding.
But this is just the beginning! We know that our Seabury students love to go above and beyond their levels and to be challenged with meaningful, mind-stretching ideas and problems. With this in mind, we add lots of muscle and sinew to the Math Connects curriculum, creating fun, inspiring, and outside of the box activities to enrich our experience.
Global Math Project is a perfect example!
We started by watching the Exploding Dots video and divided into pairs to figure out what 10011 is in our base 10 system. The kids were absolutely engaged in this math puzzler for the rest of the class period, helping each other, comparing with each other, solving the problem, and, unbeknownst to them, discovering base 2!
We worked in pairs and came up with a variety of strategies.
"Exploding Dots is normally a game where there are five boxes.
If there are two dots in a box,
they explode in the next place value."
Emphasis mine - using math terms during our "Math Talk"
Collaboration, a 21st century skill
Problem solving, another 21st century skill
"I love Exploding Dots. They are so fun to use.
You make 5 squares and put a certain number in the first box.
Then you explode pairs of two. When the pairs of two explode,
they turn into one and go into the next box."
Notice how she kept track of her trials and errors at the top.
Can YOU figure out the correct answer??
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The next day we played a game called "Race to a Flat" using base 10 blocks. It was a perfect review of regrouping in addition and subtraction (chapter 2 of Math Connects).
With our strong understanding of place value,
we then played the game using different bases.
Base 5
"Exploding Dots is fun.
Base 10, 2, 3, and so on is fun, too."
Base 5 uses the digits 0-4.
Base 3.
The die has 4, 5, and 6 covered.
Racing to a flat in base 3.
We flipped a coin when we played base 2.
We talked about how base 2 is used in computers.
The joy of working hard and doing math well!
"It was fun to do "Race to a Flat".
I discovered we could make a dice rolling machine.
I also discovered that it's kind of hard to do it.
And I know that I can do math in different bases."
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