Image of the Week: Ask the Question, What’s Missing?

Ask the Question: What’s Missing?

We have hundreds of Look-Think-Talk activities on our website and one way to find just what you’re looking for is by focusing on the central mathematical question you will ask students to think about. Each question can lead to different kinds of big ideas, and in this series of videos we’ll share with you what opportunities posing a particular question can open up. We encourage you to explore new questions you can ask to get into deep mathematical discussions.

This week, we focus on the question: What’s missing? This question asks students to look not at what they can see, but what they cannot and imagine what or how many objects it might take to fill in the emptiness. This question requires imagination and possibly spatial reasoning, decomposition, and relating part and whole. Watch our What’s missing? video to see what is possible with this question and give one of these activities a try with your students tomorrow.

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group