Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Which one does not belong?

I have  my students creating their own which one does not belong. Today one of the students came up with Add, Addition, Plus, More as their contribution.  I write the volunteers Which one does not belong on the board and have the students decide which one does not belong.  One student said more because it could mean either addition or subtraction depending on the way it was used.  Another said addition because it was a transition or it could mean a room built on to the house.  I was thrilled with the answer because I work with mostly ELL students and this is helping develop their vocabulary so they can distinguish between specialized usage of math terms and the generalized meanings. 
Another student came up with 0, 2, 5, 6.  The answers students came up with were 0 because it is not a natural number.  2 because it can be squared or added to itself to get the same answer and 5 because it is the only odd number in the group.  I have been doing this for about 2 weeks and they are getting much better at using their knowledge to create these and in coming up with answers other than, its the only one with the letter E or its the shortest number. 
In addition, this is carrying over into the warm-up question where I have them create and answer their own word problems. They are getting much faster at creating the problems and they are starting to create more complex problems.
Next week, I am going to roll 5 dice and have students use the order of operation to create a certain number.  I did it earlier in the week and one of my students requested we do it again.

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