Today's session had a good focus and lots of engagement. We focused on odd and even and I felt that they really got a chance to review their experience with the concept. It was done with two activities. The first was finding dominoes. That made the activity more fun but of course took more time. As our metaphor for learning is exploring it was a perfect way to do it.
I liked today's activities because they were all about arousing curiosity and discussing things and we had loads of discussion. Kids were able to see things in lots of ways which is just what I felt was needed for this project.
We moved on to using numicon to explore odd and even. I got them to put them in order. Numicon manipulatives are naturally attractive and invite kids to play and try things themselves. And as these were laid out already, they all just got on with it and played.
The task I had in mind was easy to engage them with. I started with ordering and then sorting in their own way. The sorting into two groups was a little harder for them. The concept of two groups with common elements didn't make sense but the little ones managed to sort them in terms of big and small ones. Tay then came up with odd and even as a way to split them and they had no difficulty. I left them to come up with a way to see the difference for themselves. They did see the extra bit as making it odd. I asked questions about combining odd and even ones and asked if they would make odd or even. This took a little work but we got there. I then asked about combining all of the numbers. Ndg used Gauss' trick to tell that the answer was 55 (sum of 1 to 10). He showed how it would work using the numicon pieces to make number bonds to 11. The little ones put it into a long shape and showed that it had an extra bit. I tried a few other questions like taking a random tile and seeing if they thought it was odd or even and getting them to prove it. I also tried putting them all together.
I think the only think I would do differently about this session is add more structure to the splitting the tiles into two groups. I could capitalise on the table we had used and get them to write on (or dictate) a heading for each group.
I liked today's activities because they were all about arousing curiosity and discussing things and we had loads of discussion. Kids were able to see things in lots of ways which is just what I felt was needed for this project.
To begin with running to find particular dominoes to place in the grid got them thinking about the words and ideas and ways of communicating usefully about odd and even numbers.
What happened - Students arrived and I introduced them to the grid and got them to explain some of the words and the parts of the table (columns and pairs as the word came out for the rows). I don't think that everyone got the sense of the columns and rows as opposed treating the spaces as meaning what ever card they are close to. Getting the idea of common traits is a tricky thing to model or present. There was a lot of this idea in the session today and it would be difficult to find a more important basic idea in maths (basically sets).
Explorers went out and looked for any domino to bring to the grid. Tay was the only one who hadn't hidden any dominoes and he was the one who was most excited by it and found the most dominoes. I think some of the others just found ones that they had hidden themselves.
It was a little harder to get them to find a specific types of dominoes. We had columns that dealt with odd totals and even totals and then rows that dealt with the parity of each side of the domino. We had plenty of discussion about where things should go and MSJ and C20 (our new code names worked pretty well) never fully internalised the significance of the columns and rows so needed to be asked about it each time.
We moved on to using numicon to explore odd and even. I got them to put them in order. Numicon manipulatives are naturally attractive and invite kids to play and try things themselves. And as these were laid out already, they all just got on with it and played. 
The task I had in mind was easy to engage them with. I started with ordering and then sorting in their own way. The sorting into two groups was a little harder for them. The concept of two groups with common elements didn't make sense but the little ones managed to sort them in terms of big and small ones. Tay then came up with odd and even as a way to split them and they had no difficulty. I left them to come up with a way to see the difference for themselves. They did see the extra bit as making it odd. I asked questions about combining odd and even ones and asked if they would make odd or even. This took a little work but we got there. I then asked about combining all of the numbers. Ndg used Gauss' trick to tell that the answer was 55 (sum of 1 to 10). He showed how it would work using the numicon pieces to make number bonds to 11. The little ones put it into a long shape and showed that it had an extra bit. I tried a few other questions like taking a random tile and seeing if they thought it was odd or even and getting them to prove it. I also tried putting them all together.
We finished off with split 3 ways and started the grid to record the scores. All except C20 got on well with this. He was a bit distracted by playing with blocks and had to be persuaded. So I think he only played me.
I think the only think I would do differently about this session is add more structure to the splitting the tiles into two groups. I could capitalise on the table we had used and get them to write on (or dictate) a heading for each group.
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