A Visit to Grade 7

This morning I had the pleasure of visiting a grade 7 class to see what they are doing in math. It was a great experience, and interesting to see what’s going on.

They were working with counters to create a bucket of zeros, and using that to represent operations with integers. Thos particular question was an adding question and didn’t need zeros in the bucket, but yellow represented positive, and red negative and students knew to add the quantities together and create zero pairs and see that there is -1 that remains as their answer.

Students did purposeful practice reading and interpreting using visual representation of counters and also colouring in counters to arrive at their answer. After students got their work checked, they moved on to the next task which was to solve a Tarsia puzzle in groups. The puzzle was again practice with integer addition.

The bucket of zeros came back out and they worked through how to subtract using the bucket. They solved several subtraction questions as a class. They started off being sure their bucket has zero pairs. Next they placed their first value at the top of the bucket. This question starts out with -1 (one red counter) at the top. The instructions then say to remove/subtract/takeaway +6 (6 yellow counters). Students then removed 6 yellow counters from inside the bucket. What was left were 7 red counters and a bunch of zero pairs. The answer to the question is -7 due to the 7 red counters remaining.

After several examples and chances to practice, students had time to use their integer skills while playing cards. The red was negative and black was positive. Face cards were worth 10. Students flipped cards over and raced to determine the sum of their cards. Whoever got it right first got the cards. It became a little heated! Students were actively involved. Some used counters still, and others were feeling quite confident to add integers without concrete tools.

Thank you very much for inviting me to experience such an active and engaging lesson! I look forward to connecting further as the year progresses.