“That’s a lot of smiles,” Keira (10) said as we waited for our Teen Burgers.
“Yeah. How many?” I asked. “A lot” wasn’t going to fly with a “real-world” number talk in front of us.
“Sixty-three and nineteen is… hold on,” Keira said. She wanted to add tens and ones: three twenties is sixty and one and two make three. She knew that the nine in nineteen would make this strategy more challenging. So she took advantage of the associative property and (wisely) punted.
After a few moments Keira offered eighty-two. She explained that sixty-three and twenty make eighty-three so sixty-three and nineteen make eighty-two.
Her sister Gwyneth (13) used a different strategy. “I took one from the twenty-one and gave it to the nineteen,” she said. “That’s four twenties–ha!–and two more.”
At Graham Fletcher’s session at the Northwest Mathematics Conference in Whistler, he shared a story of one student using this strategy after engaging in his Bright Idea task: “Numbers are just Skittles now,” she said. Similarly, Gwyneth decomposed twenty-one, taking and giving one to create two landmark or friendly numbers. To Gwyneth, numbers are just smiles.
Chris Hunter 