My six year old son and I were working on cutting out snowflakes (more on this later, it’s a fun project in itself) and at one point we wanted to count the number of symmetries our snowflake was going to have, which we worked out would be 9 + 9. My son said aloud, “Okay. 8 + 8 is 16. 9 + 9 is… uh… 18! Because 8 + 9 is 17!”
How often do you see students use counting as a strategy for finding a sum of two numbers? Is this common? How do we encourage this type of reasoning?
Hi David
Many schools in New Zealand are basing their teaching in numeracy on this strategic way of thinking and learning.
Here is a link to a resource: http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/number-information?parent_node=
regards
Judy