Pocket Day will happen every Thursday in second grade. We will be figuring out how many pockets we are wearing in our classroom all together. Each week we'll practice a different addition strategy to find the total accurately and quickly. We will also use this data to create bar graphs, tally charts, pictographs, and lots more.
Yesterday, because it was our first pocket day, we worked together as a class to find out how many pockets 18 kids were wearing.
First, we predicted. We had predictions from 15 pockets up to 50 pockets! We then came up with a plan. Our plan was to take a cube for every pocket we wore. Some of us took 6 cubes - and others of us took none! We made a tally chart to keep track of how many students had that number of pockets.
After that, we put all of the cubes together into one long strip. It was too long to see how many cubes there were, and counting by ones seemed inaccurate and time-consuming. As mathematicians, we know we should solve a problem two different ways to make sure we had arrived at the correct answer.
First, we counted by 10s. We made 3 full rows of ten and then we had 9 more cubes left over. We debated how to count. Some of us thought we should count, "ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three..." and so on up to thirty-nine. Others of us thought we should count "ten, twenty, thirty, forty" and then count backwards one since we were one short of a full row of ten. Both landed us at thirty-nine cubes when counting by 10s. Next, we put the cubes all back together. We tried counting by 2s. We found this harder, but still arrived at 39 cubes in all. This means we had 39 pockets in our class!
We will be keeping a chart of all of our Pocket Days in 2nd grade. We added our first Pocket Day totals to the chart.
I wonder how many pockets we'll have next week!
