It sure is fun when Math Methods course work is immediately applied to a classroom. This past two weeks in math we introduced unit 7 multiplication and division to our 5th graders. It was helpful to teach a lesson, go back to our methods class and design the unit, and then go back and teach some more.
It has been exciting to see all the ways in which students see the math problems. As we continue this unit I get to find fun ways to preview work for the next lesson.
Yesterday our worm up problem was: There are 123 students going o a field trip and I want them to be distributed evenly into four buses. How many students will be on each bus?
Students had about 3 minutes to work independently at their tables. Then they had a chance to discuss in the table groups. This was a very fun problem for students to solve because they wondered what to do with the other three students and wondered why the problem said evenly.
I went around the classroom and students said, “You can put them on top of the bus…,” “You don’t go on the field trip…,” “You can’t chop a student in half!” and “You can put one more in each bus.”(Part of the enthusiasm about the problem could have been because they are going on a field trip next week.) As the students solved the problem they wondered what to do with the remaining students. After a few more minutes of group work we started to share out different ways of solving the problem.
Pensamientos de Teacher 
Mar 08, 2014 @ 21:32:57
This post made me smile, both because I know how great the feeling is to have something from coursework come up in the classroom and also because our class had the same concerns when we solved a similar problem. I am curious how the conversation continued and if a consensus was reached. Did you or your cooperating teacher address the concerns or did you let the students try to solve it and discuss it coming up with a solution of their own?
Mar 08, 2014 @ 22:40:38
Yes, we did continue the conversation and we discussed why some of the responses would not make sense. Most students agreed that in a situation like this we would want to come up with a reasonable response, like adding a student to three of the buses. It was actually really interesting because the language used in math problems can really cause some confusion among struggling students. The word “evenly” threw off even the strongest of students. I really do like to explain the situation to students that struggle because some of them only see numbers and symbols and language can be an extra hurdle.