Cognitively Guided Instruction

CGI Training

Grade 3 Reflections

Use this page to post reflections/questions, responses to collegues questions and reflections, important learnings and other good information.

I'm wondering if anyone has ideas for TAG students other than giving them bigger numbers. 

Sharon

I'm finding that the sharing the sts. do is especially beneficial for when they have a wrong answer.  Most times as they are sharing their process they realize on their own that their answer is wrong.

Brenda

 My sts. enjoy writing their own word problems.

Brenda

My students have been doing quite well when solving problems, then explaining their strategies for solving them. However, the two types causing the most difficulty are separate result unknown and join change unknown.  Any suggestions for helping them? Are there questioning techniques I should be using? 

Sharon

Nov. 30, 2009

Here is the base 10 problem that I posed to my students:

Pick a number to try:           50                    122                    419                    678                    1,062

Grandma has made _______ holiday cookies. She wants to give a bag of 10 cookies to each of her friends and neighbors. How many bags of 10 can she make? Will there be any left that don't make a bag of 10?

Some of the student responses are as follows:

Drawing some groups of tens and drawing bags around them and any leftovers drawn in singles on the side.

Some students separated the ones out mentally and used the rest of the number to represent tens.

Mary

December 23

This is my base 10 problem:  Franz has ____boxes of cookies.  There are 10 cookies in each box.  How many cookies does Franz have?  Number choices are  8, 80, 180, 8,000.

The large numbers terrified some students!  I should have left off 180 and 8,000 and tried them later.

For the number choice 8, two out of 18 students drew 10 circles in each of 8 boxes.

Five students drew 8 boxes and wrote numbers 10, 20, 30......in the boxes.

Four students repeatedly added 10.  One student added 8. 

Five students multiplied 8 X10.  One student added 10 + 8. (When I looked back at this student's work, I found he consistently tries this method whenever there are two numbers in the problem.  I'll make a point to check on him next time.)

For the choice 80, more students used repeated addition. 

When we shared our solutions several students who hadn't attempted the 8,000 choice were excited to see how others had repeatedly added 8,000.  Our principal had just announced that our school had collected approx. 7,000 pop cans.  We discussed how to calculate the money raised @ 5 cents per can.  Later in the day I heard some of my kids bragging to others, "We figured out that we raised almost $350!"

Barb from Postville