Frog Riddles

It's a new year and a new math group. Some of the students were in my language group last year. A couple are new to our class. Others I know as they were in Sky last year, though not in one of my small groups. As I often do, I have chosen an early activity from Marilyn Burn's and Bonnie Tank's A Collection of Math Lessons from Grades 1 through 3. Basing my lesson on the chapter on "Riddles with Color Tiles," I do Frog Riddles. First students use frog counters in four colors to come up with solutions to clues I give about what combination of frog counters are in a bag I have. They work in groups of two (generated by drawing a colored cube from a box). After we do a couple of riddles and talk about the process, each group is asked to come up with their own riddle of at least 4 clues. Each clue should move the solver closer to the solution, and the solver should be able to get the solution by the last clue. It takes some thought, logic, and planning to develop a riddle. After each group completed a riddle, we exchanged bags and clues and tested each others' riddles. Some were returned to the pairs that developed them for additional clues or clearer clues. Each partnership ended up with a successful riddle.

Fractions

This week I pulled out several board games we have that use fractions. As we looked at them, we discussed what fractions actually are. Students often say they do not know what fractions are. Yet if you ask them to give you half of something they can do it. The gap is between the abstract idea of fractions and their experiential understanding of the world. So part of what we work on is bridging that gap, using manipulatives and talking about what they represent.

Today we used frog counters in two colors to represent fractional parts of groups of objects. If you have 6 frogs and half of them are red, what does that look like? Students made groupings that fit the fraction given and worked on writing the fraction. Can you show what it looks like if one third of them are a given color? Is there another fraction name that would represent the same amount? Some quickly came to 2/6, while others got help from a partner to figure it out.