February 21

Yesterday our Good Math Question was about bowling pins. We noticed that pins can be either up or down. That limits our "numbers stories" to combinations of 2 numbers. The question is, "How can we tell when we have found all the ways five pins can be arranged in up and down positions?"

We have not finished sorting this out in our minds. Some children are hot on the trail of the concept that creating an ordered list (0,1,2,3...) would help, but can't quite do it or explain why that strategy works.

Note that it is important for the children to internalize the strategy, so we are spending time working with the concept instead of simply having me tell them what to do. Knowing when to stop is a big piece of doing Mathematical thinking.