This summer, as Gwyneth and I were packing up Othello, I started playing with different arrangements of discs – mostly arrays – and asked her “How many?” I remembered the following arrangement, taken from AIMS’ Cookie Combos activity.
“Sixteen plus nine, so nineteen plus six… twenty, twenty-five,” she said. (I don’t think that she actually said “twenty” aloud. That came after my clarifying question: “Wait. Huh?”)
There’s a lot happening in Gwyneth’s bridging through twenty strategy – partitioning of quantities, place value, commutative property, breaking apart to make (a multiple of) ten. All within a three count, standard algorithm be damned.
This invented strategy discussion was a happy accident. The goal of this problem when we pose it to teachers is to see different ways to visualize the group and represent these using expressions. It’s about valuing different methods; the solution – counting 25 cookies – is easy enough.
How many do you see? How do you see them? How many different ways can you find?
Some popular solutions:
If you look just right, you can see two arrays:
A creative solution that involves counting what’s not there:
And moving what is:
If you plan on using these images with your students, I recommend displaying the photo with just white discs. This leaves the problem open. Two colours were used above to illustrate various visualizations. This can steer student thinking. (See how the use of colour is intended to be helpful here.) If students miss one of the visualizations above, display that photo and ask for the expression (or vice versa).
