Math Reflection Week 4: Rich Tasks and Number Flexibility

This week in our math class we focused on participating in and assessing rich learning tasks in math. A rich tasks boils down to one that is: essential, authentic, engaging, and active. One such task that we performed in class was a problem involving counting the fingers on a hand. The basic problem was that if you started counting your fingers starting with your thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb, index, etc. what finger will you land on when you count your 10,000 finger? Everyone came up with different ways of solving this question but the one that I found most interesting was the one Mina shared with the class. It was a video of how someone else solved the problem by thinking of it as an eight fingered hand rather than just one five fingered hand.

Michael Feagan. (Sept.29 2017). Hand Problem [photo].

I think that all of the different ways students had to express this problem help support that this is a rich learning activity.

The final thing I did this week was watch the math mindset video on number flexibility. The exercise the video wanted us to do was to do 18x5 in our heads. I did this by knowing that if 10x10 was 100 then 5x10 would be 50 and 5x8 is 40, so 50+40 is 90. Perhaps a longer way of doing it, but I would not be surprised if I had many students in my math classes who would mentally answer this question this way. This exercise is pretty similar to doing math strings, which I think are an excellent way of bettering number flexibility.

Math strings I think are an excellent way to better a student's mental math flexibility. Recently I presented a webinar with my classmate Paula that highlights the benefits of doing math strings, you can see it in the video below.