3 Act Reflections

I just watched Kristin Gray's Ignite about Creating a Culture of Learning and it inspired me to do a little of my own reflecting.  Don't get me wrong-I'm always reflecting.  Stewing, perhaps, would be a better word.  But yeah, let's call if reflecting.  Sometimes I feel the need to do it more productively than just going over and over it in my mind.   So here goes.

Last week we did one of Graham Fletcher's 3 Act Tasks called Downsizing Tomatoes (a task to which I have a special bond via a ketchup bottle).  Basically Graham pours "ketchup" out of a larger bottle into smaller bottles.  The question is, how many bottles can he fill?  We are knee deep in subtraction and we needed to shake something up a little.  Somehow we had found ourselves in a rut and I needed to dig us out! 

We hadn't done a 3 act in a while and I knew the problem was going to be hard.  I planned to give us a couple of days to work on it, but that was probably the extent of the planning that I did.  Routines are pretty solid in my class: we know how to notice and wonder, we know how to estimate, and we know where to find tools.  I knew it'd be challenging, but I was totally confident that we could do it.

Well, results were mixed, as expected.

Firstly, students were really bent out of shape that the liquid inside the bottle was not actually ketchup.  They noticed it was honey, maple syrup or apple juice.  They just couldn't believe that it was water and food coloring.  We decided to call it fake ketchup. They could deal with that. 

I also had a lot of students who noticed that there were 10 small bottles and that really got in the way when they were trying to figure out how many little bottles were filled.  It comes down to many students not knowing what question they were solving.  

This student, for example, really persevered and found out how much ketchup Mr. Fletcher would need to fill up all of the 10 bottles.  Great strategy, nice use of base 10 blocks...not the question we were answering! (We have the information to solve this problem, but considering I wanted us to have the potential for subtraction, this was not the question we were going to use.)

Then we have this students' work.  She was making groups of 64 on the 100s chart.  She seemed to have made sense of the problem and certainly persevered in solving it.  But she has some scribbled out numbers that apparently don't count, and only made it to 300, instead of 397. (Upon revision of her work, she realized her mistake.)



Then we have this friend, who again was solving the wrong problem by focusing on the 10 bottles.  But when he got his answer, he did not put it back into the context of the problem to see if it made sense!  164 bottles?! (And yes, we need to clarify a bit on this repeated addition and multiplication stuff!)



I also had some students who clearly made sense of the problem, but didn't quite know how to use the math to get to the right answer.  



Some students were being very very creative with their tools-good thinking, but I'm not sure our balance scales are accurate enough to solve the problem like this!

Ok, it's not all bad.  I also have this student who revised her work THREE TIMES before she got the right answer.  She was so thrilled to do it! Talk about perseverance!  (Although I'm still not sure what strategy she used for all that addition!)



So after the second day, I felt super frustrated.  I still had a significant group of students who were just not making sense of the problem and determining the right tool to use.  After some conferring with Jamie Duncan I decided that we needed to go back to the basics.  I had a group of students to whom I gave some specific feedback using seesaw (my miracle tool!) who I thought could realize and revise their mistakes on their own.  And another group that needed to see 397 ones blocks in a jar get spilled out, 64 at a time, into smaller jars, replicating exactly what Mr. Fletcher does in the video.  Students put the 64 ones blocks into the cups.  Some students started working with money and realized they needed to do some decomposing! Students counted and recounted.  Students engaged in mathematical discourse.  We even talked about precision when students said a half of a jar was filled, instead of just a little more.  All good stuff!


We finally were able to share Act 3, students felt good about their work (regardless of whether they had the right answer or not), and all of our brains hurt! 


I have some takeaways:
-this group of students needs to make sure that they think about what tools they want to use and how they are going to use them before they even start.  
-students should write down in their notebook what problem they are solving to avoid frustration later!
-some of my students are still very concrete learners.  I need to plan better for this.  
-I need to solve the problem myself.  I know this-unfortunately the time crunch gets in the way (excuses, excuses).

We are going to do act 4 tomorrow.  I found a jar of Chili Sauce in my fridge that I emptied out (I think it was getting moldy anyway!) and will fill with water and food coloring.  I will pour it into a smaller jar, just like Graham does.  I want to see what students will do this time.  Will they go for the same strategy? Will they use a classmates strategy? Will they request the bottle to do the pouring themselves?  Will they learn from their past mistakes?

I'm also debating with bringing a Franks Red Hot bottle also. It's much bigger.  A couple of my students who are more experienced with addition and subtraction might enjoy a tougher challenge.  Or, maybe I just change up the question to have an open middle: {still musing on this question}.