Category: Operations

Prime Factor Stacks

Carol Cashion, teacher of math and other high school equivalency subjects at the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and I co-led this meeting. In October, I observed Carol’s class when she introduced factors using blocks. I was interested to see how the approach opened up a tangible way of playing with factors and concepts such as greatest common factor. In our teachers’ circle, Carol explained her lesson plan and then we explored “prime factor stacks” as a problem-posing and problem-solving method. -Eric

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Number Pyramids

In this meeting, we explored Henri Piccioto’s number pyramid puzzles through notice/wonder, generating questions for problem-solving and additional puzzles for students.

At the beginning of the meeting, we shared some favorite sources of puzzles we like to use with students, include Which One Doesn’t Belong, Sometimes, Always, Never, and Open Middle.

Then I introduced Number Pyramids. Thank you to Henri Piccioto and his amazing web site of math resources. Here is the sequence we used:

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Dividing a 2-digit number by the sum of its digits

Three very different visual solutions were shared in response to a problem about dividing 2-digit numbers.

This was our first online meeting (made necessary by the COVID-19 outbreak). It was a great distraction and made it possible for Adult Numeracy Network friends to join us from the Hudson Valley, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. Our meetings for the next few months will almost certainly be online, so join us if you’re able.

The problem for this meeting came from Math with Bad Drawings and @mathsjem before that:

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