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Thursday, September 12, 2013

How Many Miles to 1,000?



Before we begin subtraction, I like to pose this question:

Suppose you are taking a trip. Your destination is 1,000 miles away. You're starting to get VERY bored in the car, so you decide to figure out how much farther you have to go. You ask your dad how far you've already gone, and he says you've just reached mile 632. How do you figure out how many miles are left of your trip?

The kids then use whatever strategy they wish to solve the problem. Just as with our addition lesson, the kids show their different strategies. There are always many different ones! These are just a few we saw in our room. The most interesting thing is that even though this is technically a subtraction problem because we need to find the difference, most the kids turned the problem into an addition problem. They are so much more comfortable with addition! Most didn't even realize they had done this until we pointed it out in class.

This activity will lead us into examining our different subtraction strategies tomorrow.

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