Educating Risa

After playing the popsicle stick creativity game, I recalled a game I had seen on Alicia’s amazing blog about using coloured-on-one-side beans to practice math facts. I used a marker to colour one side of some popsicle sticks—5 sticks (red) for Gareth, and 10 sticks (blue) for Daegan. I then demonstrated dropping the sticks and drawing the addition fact shown, using Gareth’s 5 red sticks:

I gave Gareth his pile of sticks and he gave it a go:

He then drew the sticks on paper, and coloured them in.

It had to stifle a laugh as he was concentrating so hard, he had the little-kid-tongue-sticking-out thing going on:

Meanwhile, Daegan got busy with his group of 10 one-side-blue sticks. He was rather enthusiastic about the dropping part, and more than once they ended up scattered across the dining room floor as well as on the table:

I then extended this activity briefly with Daegan, to demonstrate the associative property of addition. We used 5 red sticks and 5 blue sticks, and dropped. We got 2 blue sticks, 2 red sticks, and 6 uncoloured ones. I drew the following:

Originally I only drew the picture and wrote 2+2+6 = 10. I grouped the coloured (red and blue) sticks together to demonstrate left-hand side addition in the picture above (i.e., (2+2)+6, or 4+6), and grouped the red sticks with the uncoloured sticks to demonstrate the right-hand-side (i.e., 2+(2+6), or 2+8). Daegan understood that with addition, it doesn’t matter how the numbers are grouped—you arrive at the same answer.