Hay MTW 3rd Grade :: Collaborative Learning Centers Project

"LET'S PAY BILLS" REGROUPING WITH PORTION CUPS

State Goal 6: Demonstrate a knowledge and sense of numbers and their representations, including basic operations, ratios, and proportions, by using multiple ways of obtaining exact values and estimates to understand patterns involving numbers and their applications.

Chicago Academic Standard: Solve real-world problems which require addition, subtraction, multiplication, and/or division by appropriate strategies such as using manipulatives, estimation, mental computation, paper and pencil, and calculators.

Materials: Portion cups, pinto beans, desks

Activity: The students, in a previous activity, had prepared portion cups with ten beans each. Each student was given ten cups. and nine loose beans. The class was instructed to take out six tens and four ones. I instructed the students to think of the beans as money and asked them how much they had. They responded that they had sixty-four dollars.

Then I said "Now it is time to pay the bills. You owe twenty-eight dollars. How many ones is that?" Once they gave an answer I asked, "Well, do you have enough at the top to pay the bottom?"..They said no so you must "borrow from your neighbor." Their neighbor only has ten dollar bills. The neighbor "loans the ones place the money." Students represent this by taking one cup from the tens place and pouring it in the ones place in order to "pay the ones' bill." Then students repeat the "borrowing and bill-paying" procedure with the tens and hundreds places.

Outcomes and assessments: The children work together to complete five problems, each explaining to the other what is happening and using their manipulatives. They must turn in a work sheet with the five problems completed.