School-wide Math Challenge

Ms. Hardy, our vice-principal and former math coach for our family of schools, presented a problem for all teachers to solve before giving it to their students. Together, during one of our staff meetings we had to work with a partner to show how we would go about solving the following problem:

It was interesting to see all of the different methods teachers chose to solve the problem and how similar we are to our students in terms of how we even approach such a challenge.

Since this was a school-wide math challenge, the mathematicians in JK began by reading stories that included farm animals (just in case some of us had never seen a pig or chicken) and then we took a look at the plastic pigs and chickens in our bin of farm animals.

We used these pig and chicken manipulatives to help us count the animals and legs but counting 52 legs was tricky for some and so we tried different combinations such as 4 animals and 10 legs, 6 animals and 16 legs, 8 animals and 20 legs, 10 animals and 26 legs, 12 animals and 30 legs, 14 animals and 36 legs and finally 16 animals and 42 legs.

When the focus became more about drawing pigs and chickens than on keeping track of the number of animals and counting legs, we tried pasting pictures of pigs and chickens onto a piece of paper and showing our work by crossing some out when we had too many and gluing on more when necessary. We tried as much as possible to show our work or to have our thinking recorded on our paper. Most mathematicians persevered until they were able to find a solution to some version of the problem but for some it was tricky to keep track of both a certain number of animals in addition to a specified number of legs.

In the end it was fun to challenge ourselves as mathematicians especially for those with older siblings working on the same math problem! Hopefully Ms. Hardy will have more school-wide math challenges for us to solve in the future so that we can continue to get ideas and learn from each other.