Image of the Week: Asking How Many? with Coins

Anticipating Student Thinking: Asking How Many? with Coins

Here at multiplicity lab, we’ve created a video series designed to help you prepare to facilitate Look-Think-Talk activities with your students. One of the best ways to prepare for mathematical conversations with our students is by anticipating students’ thinking. When we try to imagine what our students might say, we prime ourselves to better hear, understand, and respond to their ideas. It also helps us open up to diverse ways of seeing and problem-solving. We can never anticipate everything that children might say, but by practicing anticipating students’ thinking we can better embrace the multiplicity of approaches students might take and see the possible mathematical connections between students’ ideas.

 In the Anticipating Student Thinking series, we share videos of a single activity that includes some of the ways that students might interpret, think about, and solve the task. In just 3 – 5 minutes, you could be ready to launch a juicy mathematical conversation with your students.

Give it a try! Building on the How many? video we shared a few weeks ago, this week we explore how students might think about the question How many? with the image of coins shown above.

For our international teachers: We know that US coin knowledge is needed – or being developed – when we ask How many? with coins, and that this knowledge is not something your students likely have or need. To try out this activity, consider how you could use the structure we have built with your own nation’s coins. Arrange similar coins using two values (like our 1-cent pennies and 10-cent dimes) into an array on your document camera and see what your students do when you ask, How many?

One final note on NCTM: If you are coming to Chicago this week for NCTM’s Annual Meeting, come see Jen talk about Look-Think-Talk activities on Thursday morning!

​To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group