Math Collaboration

4th Grade Purple is encouraged to talk about and collaborate during math.  Turn and talk, learning from one another, group work and sharing ideas are all ways students learn with and from one another.  In today's class, students worked with a  partner to solve questions about table data and then correctly construct a bar graph from it.

Sums, Differences, Products, Quotients

In our math huddle today, each student chose a digit between 3 and 9.  Due to the nature of the activity, 0, 1, 2 are too small and we wanted to use only single digits for this activity.  Then number the students chose was written in the center of a new page of their math huddle notebook.  This number then could represent a sum, a difference, a product or a quotient; meaning that students had to find equations using addition, subtraction, multiplication and/or division where the answer equaled the digit on their page.  This was a fun, challenging activity where students needed to think critically.  We also had some answers that involved multiple digits and operations, and the use of parenthesis was incorporated a few times.

Problem Solving

In groups, students worked to solve translational word problems using division.  Each group was given a problem which they had to first decipher the information they know and then figure out what they were solving for.  Then they used any division method to solve their problem.  Working together helps students learn from and teach each other.