Let's talk today about some of my most popular
second grade building thinking classroom style
math tasks. Hello and welcome to Making Number
Sense Make Sense, a podcast for elementary teachers,
specifically early elementary teachers, looking
to really make an impact in the number sense
of their students. I found that I had a lot of
fun creating second grade tasks because I guess
I was just in my storytelling era and I really
wanted each task to come with a story, a background
story to get kids really involved and wanting
to solve the tasks. Each task starts with some
task launch slides, some kind of thin slicing
built in, and either three levels of check your
understanding, so mild, medium, and spicy, or
notes to help consolidate the learning. The first
task is a money task, and a little boy has opened
a lemonade stand and wants to make $2 in sales.
So if the lemonade is sold for $0 .10 a glass,
how many glasses would he need to sell to make
$2? And the thin slicing or how it gets more
challenging is say he wants to increase the prices.
So instead of 10 cents, he wants to charge 25
cents per glass. How many glasses would he need
to sell to make $2? And for the check your understanding
piece to see if they can apply what they had
been doing previously to other situations, you
could propose that maybe he wants to make. $3
in sales or $5 in sales to see if they can continue
what they did before to figure out how many glasses
of lemonade Charlie would need to sell. The next
task is about arrays, equal groups, and repeated
addition. In this task, your students have a
dream of opening an ice cream shop. But to start
off with, they're going to start with an ice
cream. So in this ice cream cart, they have to
figure out how many scoops of ice cream each
order has. So it might say like three cones with
four scoops each, and they have to figure out
how many scoops that is to complete the order.
And as they move through the thin slices, they
move from the ice cream stand that they started
with to a truck to eventually their ice cream
shop. And as they move through, they have more
cones and more scoops that might be what the
customer wants. The next task I'm going to talk
about is a partitioning shapes task. So in this
one, your students are helping the delicious
pizzeria figure out their orders. So in this
pizzeria, you can have circle pizzas or rectangular
pizzas. And their customers want their pizzas
divided in a very specific way. So in order to
fill these orders, they need to figure out how
to partition the shapes for either two, three,
or four equal sharers. So either in halves. thirds,
or fourths. The next task is skip counting by
five, 10, and 100 up to a thousand. And if you
couldn't tell already, I love a pun. So this
one is about the Orange You Sweet Orange Factory.
And in this factory, they sell gift baskets of
either five oranges per basket, 10 oranges per
basket, or 100 oranges per basket. And to complete
the orders, they need to figure out how many
oranges they need. So maybe a customer ordered
two five orange baskets and three 100 orange
baskets. So they would have to figure out how
many oranges are needed to complete that order.
The last task I'm going to talk about today is
a two -step subtraction task. So this one is
not as involved as the other ones. It does have
a theme, but really because this type of task
can be tricky. I wanted the focus to be more
on the skill that they're doing versus the story.
This task is set in a jungle so some animals
go away and then some more animals go away so
that's the two -step subtraction and what really
helps this task gain in difficulty is the type
of numbers that are being used. So at first,
the numbers might be friendlier, not require
any regrouping, and increase in difficulty from
there. Something about subtraction problems,
especially if you are using manipulatives, which
I would highly suggest for a task like this,
it can be really, really great to see all of
the different strategies that students are able
to do when they're doing a task like this. Linked
in the show notes is a blog post where you can
see all of these tasks written out. I'd love
to know which task you want to try first.