Number Puzzles: Addition and Subtraction

After playing the Illustrative Math center Can You Build It? (Link) for a few days with my daughter, I decided to switch gears and introduce the Number Puzzles: Addition and Subtraction center (Link). I intentionally chose this center for two reasons:

1. I like Open Middle problems (Link), and that’s what the puzzles in this center remind me of.
2. I wanted to revisit two-digit addition before re-introducing three-digit addition.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Number Puzzles center, here’s what it looks like:

Number Puzzles: Addition and Subtraction, Stage 3, Puzzle 1

Each stage includes several puzzles. In the example puzzle above, students have to make the equations true by filling in the blanks using the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. They can only use each digit one time each. I like how all four equations show different ways of decomposing the number 75. I also like how each equation has the sum on the left side of the equal sign to combat the pervasive idea that the equal sign means “and the answer is…”

This center is really flexible because it has stages that span 1st grade through 4th grade math standards.

• Stage 1: Within 10 (1st Grade)
• Stage 2: Within 20 (1st and 2nd Grade)
• Stage 3: Within 100 without Composing (1st Grade)
• Stage 4: Within 100 with Composing (1st and 2nd Grade)
• Stage 5: Within 1,000 (3rd Grade)
• Stage 6: Beyond 1,000 (4th Grade)

For our first stage, I opted for Stage 3. I try to have my daughter practice mental math as often as possible, so I opted to start without composing so that she would feel initial success before moving on to two-digit addition with composing.

My daughter thought these were so fun! She was a little overwhelmed by the page at first so I asked her what she noticed. She said, “There are boxes. All of them have 75.” To encourage trial and error, I made her digit cards that she could move around on top of the empty boxes.

After she found the missing addend in the first equation, I asked, “How did you know it was 4?”

She replied, “Because of the equal sign, this side has to equal 75 like this side. 71…72, 73, 74, 75. It’s 4.”

I love how she talked about the meaning of the equal sign without me having to ask about it at all!

I’ll admit she was a little thrown off at first by the double boxes together in the last two equations, so I did share with her that two boxes together make a two-digit number. Then she was good to go.

Here’s a picture showing her strategy for figuring out the missing addend in the last equation.

First, she drew a representation of 75 using base ten blocks. Then she said, “I have to take away 43.” She crossed off 43 and then counted the remaining blocks in the picture. In the future I might encourage her to try a mental strategy such as counting on from 43, but this let me know where she is comfortable working right now.

Stage 3 includes five puzzles. The first three use the digits 0-5, like you see in the example above. Puzzles 4 and 5 up the challenge a bit by adding more equations and requiring you to use all of the digits 0-9 one time each.

All in all, this is a pretty fun center for students to do in pairs or independently. As a teacher, I would be sure to circulate and chat with students to see how they’re grappling with the puzzles and look for places where I can nudge their thinking about addition, subtraction, and/or place value. I would also lead a few whole class conversations around strategies so students could learn from one another. While the activity is fun and gets kids thinking about addition and place value, talking and reflecting on the puzzles is going to help students get even more out of them.

My only gripe is that there are too few puzzles per stage. Usually with centers, you want students to be able to come back to them multiple times. Unfortunately some kids may finish all five puzzles the first day and they may not be interested in doing the same puzzles more than once. Thankfully, making new puzzles isn’t too much of a challenge. Here are some pointers:

• Enlist others to help! If you work on a team of teachers, task each person with making 1-2 puzzles. The more you can share the work, the better.
• You’ll need to think of a starting number that will be the same for each equation in the puzzle. (You could decompose a different number in each equation, but there’s power in the repeated reasoning of decomposing the same number in different ways.)
• Consider the constraints of the stage you’re creating a puzzle for. For example, if you make another puzzle for Stage 3, you have to make sure you’re working within 100 and that none of your equations involve composing a ten.
• Create a mix of equations. For example, have some include a two-digit addend plus a one-digit addend, while others include a two-digit addend plus a two-digit addend. You could even include three addends!
• Think about which digits will be left blank. Be sure there’s some variety. Make sure the blanks aren’t all in the ones place in every equation, for example.
• Try out your puzzle before putting it in front of students! Make sure that every digit gets used once. While playing with my daughter using the materials linked on the Kendall Hunt IM curriculum site, I found that Stage 3, Puzzle 2 has an error. The digit 0 is used twice and the digit 1 isn’t used at all. To fix the error, change the 88 in the second equation to 87 and all is good.

So far all we’ve tried is Stage 3, but I look forward to letting my daughter play with Number Puzzles again!

Decisions, Decisions

This week our Math Rocks cohort met for the fourth time. We had two full days together in July, and we had our first after school session two weeks ago. One of our aims this year is to create a community of practice around an instructional routine, specifically the number talks routine. We spent a full day building a shared understanding of number talks back in July. You can read about that here. We also debriefed a bit about them during our session two weeks ago.

This week we put the spotlight on number talks again. We actually broke the group up by grade levels to focus our conversations. Regina led our K-2 teachers while I led our 3-5 teachers. The purpose of today’s session was to think about the decisions we have to make as teachers as we record students’ strategies. How do you accurately capture what a student is saying while at the same time creating a representation that everyone else in the class can analyze and potentially learn from?

We started the session with a little noticing and wondering about various representations of 65 – 32:

Very quickly someone brought up exactly what I was hoping for which is that some of the representations show similar strategies but in different ways. For example, the number line in the top left corner shows a strategy of counting back and so do the equations closer to the bottom right corner.

This discussion also led into another discussion about the constant difference strategy – what it is and how it works. It wasn’t exactly in my plans to go into detail about it this afternoon, but since my secondary goal for the day was to focus specifically on recording subtraction strategies, it seemed a worthwhile time investment.

After our discussions I shared the following two slides that I recreated from an amazing session I attended by Pam Harris back in May. (For the record, every session I attend with her is amazing.)

The first slide differentiates strategies from models. Basically, if you have students telling you their strategy is, “I did a number line,” and you’re cool with that, then you should read this slide closely:

The second slide differentiates tools for building relationships from tools for computation. This slide is crucial because it shows that while we want students to use tools like a hundred chart to learn about navigating numbers within 100, the goal is to eventually draw out worthwhile strategies, such as jumping forward and/or backward by 10s and then 1s.

The strategy on the right that shows 32 + 30 followed by 62 + 3 is totally the type of strategy students should eventually do symbolically after building relationships with a tool like the hundred chart.

After blowing their minds with those two slides, I led them in a number talk of 52 – 37. During my recording of their strategies, I stopped a lot to talk about why I chose to do what I did, to solicit their feedback, and even to make some changes on the fly based on our discussion.

For example, in the top right corner of the board I initially used equations to represent a compensation strategy. Someone asked if this could be modeled on a number line because she thought it might make more sense, so I did just that in the top left corner. By the time we were done they were like, “Oh, hey! That ends up looking like a strip diagram!”

It was amusing that the first strategies they shared involved constant difference. They were so excited about learning how the strategy worked that they wanted to give it a try. I didn’t want to quash their excitement by telling them that the strategy tends to work better, especially for students, when you adjust the second number to a multiple of ten. I wanted to stay focused on my goals for the day. We’ll discuss the strategy more in a future session.

(Unless you’re in Math Rocks and you’re reading this! In which case, see if you can figure out why that’s the case and share it at our next meeting.)

After some great discussion about recording a variety of strategies, we watched Kristin Gray in action leading a number talk of 61 – 27.

We talked about how she recorded the students’ strategies. We also talked about some really lovely teacher moves that I made sure to draw attention to.

We wrapped up our time together talking about what new ideas they learned that they wanted to try out with their students. I had asked one of the teachers to lead us in another number talk, but we ran out of time so I think I’m going to have her do that at the start of our next session together. Hopefully everyone will have had some intentional experiences with recording strategies between now and then to draw on during that number talk.

Oh, another thing we talked about at various points during the session was how to lead students in the direction of certain strategies. This gets into problem strings, which may or may not happen in number talks depending on whom you talk to. Regardless, here are some we came up with. Can you figure out what strategies they might be leading students to notice and think about?