Categories
Area Measurement & Data Multiplication Numbers & Operations in Base 10

Finding the Area of a Rectangle [Desmathmistakes Activity]

Here’s the work of a 4th Grader named Jaden. He has a lot of interesting ideas for finding the area of a rectangle. What do you notice in his work? What do you wonder?

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When I asked teachers this question as part of a Desmathmistakes activity, there were a lot of interesting responses. While all sorts of observations about student work are valuable, it can be especially valuable to transform our observations about student thinking into some next step. (Researchers look at work as an end in itself. When teachers look at student work it’s almost always to evaluate it or to figure out what to do next in class. We’re doing the latter here.)

Here were three of my favorite responses to the activity, with thanks to (in order) Mary, K, and Cindy.

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In case you’re curious, here is everybody’s rectangles:

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Finally, on twitter Kristin Gray is thinking in a different direction:

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Kristin’s idea is for a string of area calculation problems that all total to to the same area, but are partitioned in different ways:

Some meta-questions: What were people thinking about during this activity? What were they doing? Were they learning something? Could they be learning something?

Jump into the comments if you have some thoughts about Desmathmistakes Experiment #2.