Bye Bye Books!

Bye Bye Books is the title of the problem students needed to solve cooperatively in class Thursday.  Teams worked to apply reasoning and problem solving strategies to help Charlie give away 36 books to his friends. Teams were also given a Problem Solving Rubric which is the same rubric you see each month for a homework assignment.

This specific question gives students practice in finding all the factors of a given number.  A factor is an exact divisor or a number that divides.  Each divisor produces a quotient (the answer to a division problem) that is also a factor of the dividend (the number that is divided). For example, 4 and 9 are a factor pair of 36.  The students also had practice using square numbers.  A square number is a product of a number multiplied by itself.

Many students enter my class resistant to these types of questions.  I stressed the importance of being able to answer problems like this.  It is a skill they will need in the real world.  Students also must become comfortable with higher level questioning because the Math FCAT 2.0 focuses on more complex questions.  Problem solving and reasoning are a major focus in our classroom.

Below is the problem students were given along with a few examples of how students solved it.