SAVY 2019: Session 5, Day 4 – Solving for the Unknown (Rising 3rd/4th)

Posted by hallep on Thursday, July 18, 2019 in Grade 3, Grade 4, SAVY.

Hello SAVY parents!  Some students were able to bring their items for the store tomorrow. Thank you so much for all of your help.  Please remember if you can’t send items we will be able to improvise!

This morning I was very impressed that I when I gave the students keywords in Math and they were able to place the words in the corresponding category in our anchor chart on the wall.  The student’s use of mathematical vocabulary in their daily group discussions have been amazing!

We continued learning about two strategies: create an organized list and draw a picture to assist with solving word problems.  Students often prefer a pictorial solution to word problems but they need to  understand the reasoning behind it.  It was important that I emphasized to students their work was labeled appropriately when using a pictorial representation of their response.  An organized list was another strategy that we focused on that allowed students to eliminate possible combinations and refine their guess to either increase or decrease their answers based on their initial guess.  This strategy also allowed the opportunity for some students to reason at more sophisticated levels and make guesses based on whether their response was close to or far away from the answer they were trying to reach.

Next, we took a walk down memory lane as I was able to tell the students about how when I was a child I could buy candy in separate pieces. Students were told that “penny candy” was sold a long time ago and it had that name because much of it was worth just a few pennies.  We set up a fictious old-fashioned store named Mayberry General Store.  A station rotation activity allowed students to view several advertisements in which the price of the candy had to be determined by solving equations.  Students had to determine a solution and use the substitution method to check their solutions in each problem.  Most posters required students to make their solutions work in two equations instead of previous lessons where we only solved one equation.

Finally, all of the students were able to start working on their store set up.  Students decided on their store name, the items they were going to sell, and wrote equations that represent the cost of each item.  I’m excited to see how students will show how much they learned in such a short amount of time.

Thank you so much!!

D. Polk