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A mixed-age classroom of kids is working on the second story problem of the year.  This multiplication problem is about our principal, Ms. Silva, and her many pizzas:

Principal Silva has 9 pizzas. Each pizza has 10 slices. How many slices does she have?

CHALLENGE: How many pizzas does she need to buy to have one slice for each of our 119 Intermediate students?

Today, there is a juicy scenario happening between two of the youngest children that I’ll call Nate and Kate. Nate solved the problem quickly and recorded his thinking with ease.

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Two students were sitting together, each counting his own collection, but working side by side. One student had counted and recorded marbles in groups of 10. The other had a very large basket of red and yellow tokens on his lap counting them by 1’s as he removed them from the basket. He was on 310 when I arrived. Our conversation went as follows:

Teacher: (to the 2 students) Can you each tell me about your strategies for counting?

Child 1: I counted the marbles and wrote groups of 10, then a 4. The total is 84.

Child 2: I am counting these tokens by ones. See….310, 311, 312…

Teacher: (to child 2) I am wondering what you might do if someone bumped into the desk and some of the tokens you have already counted fell back into the basket.

Child 2: I would start over at the beginning.

At this point, my assumption was that this child was not aware of the benefit of grouping the tokens. I decided to ask Child 1 more about his grouping technique to see if Child 2 might benefit from overhearing our conversation.

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