Monday, December 19, 2011

Multiplication Number Stories



I love integrating literacy into everything! This book is about Kangaroo’s birthday, but no one will play with him: not the emu, the platypuses, the koalas, or even the dingos. They all have too many things to do. What exactly are they doing? They’re using multiplication to figure out just how many things they have to do to plan a big surprise for Kangaroo!s This past unit in Math focused on multiplication and division. We learned the key words for number stories. The students used their Student Reference Books (Everyday Math) that have a Variety Store poster that shows items being sold in different amounts. They were told to select a few items to use for Kangaroo's birthday and create a number story with the information they were given. They had to use multiplication and some students wrote division number stories. Some examples of their number stories were: 
I was planning a birthday party for Kangaroo. I went to the party store and bought 3 packs of balloons. There are 12 balloons per pack. How many balloons did I buy in all? 


The students exchanged their number stories and worked together to get the answers. I found that giving them a specific task for writing number stories really made a huge difference in the quality of their number stories. Also, since they had a purpose, they were trying really hard to write number stories that could actually happen in real life. 


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