Image of the Week: Teacher's Favorite
February 16, 2025
Teacher’s Favorite
Gwen Faulkner, 2nd Grade Teacher, Morton Grove, Illinois, US
This week we offer another image selected by one of the members of our Teacher Advisory Board, who share some of their favorite activities and stories from their classrooms. Gwen shares the fourth newsletter in this series:
We gathered on the carpet for our “Thinking Thursday” Morning Meeting activity that students look forward to each week. We start the same each week: I put the image on the board and students study it silently and put up a thumb and subsequent fingers to show how many different ways to they solved the anchor question. In this case, the question was “How many?” and I kept it as simple as that without specifying whether I meant total of dice or dots. Nearly all the students had their hands up ready to share with their classmates.
The first student calculated a total of 75 dots on the dice faces and showed us how he counted by two groups of five but then had one extra one that couldn’t be paired into two groups of five.
Another classmate realized she also counted by fives but said she found a different total than the first mathematician.
I kept track by annotating their thinking on the smartboard:
Students got excited: we had differing answers. They all wanted to come up and show how THEY saw the visual in such a way they could convince skeptics of their thinking. The conversation went deeper as students started to notice new information they had not initially taken into account. For example, two students noticed you could see the dots on other faces of dice that aren’t facing forward so they included those in the total. Other students focused on total numbers of dice, groupings of dice based on color, and some combined units to find a greater total (both total number of dots AND total number of dice combined). More students wanted to share but we had to call it a day. All are excited for the next Thinking Thursday activity. They always wonder what it will be a picture of!
Gwen Faulkner
2nd Grade Teacher, Morton Grove, Illinois, US
How might your students answer the question, How many?
To multiplicity, cheers!
Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group