2nd Grade: 1st Edition Sample Activity

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This page is an overview and menu page for all the information you need to do this Grade 2 activity.

About the Activity

In the activity Introducing Cover-Up pairs of students play the game Cover-up and record their strategies. Students share strategies in a class discussion. Their work focuses on:

  • finding one missing part when the total and one part are known

  • describing and comparing strategies

To do this activity, you, the teacher, will need:

(These files are provided in Portable Document Format (PDF) and can be read using Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. If you don't have this application, you can download it at Adobe's web site.)

Your students will need:

About the Unit

Putting Together and Taking Apart is the second grade unit on addition and subtraction (the number strand) in the Investigations curriculum. Three critical parts of understanding addition and subtraction are emphasized in this unit: (1) recognizing and interpreting addition and subtraction situations; (2) choosing numerical strategies to solve the problems presented in these situations; and (3) developing knowledge about number relationships and the structure of the number system on which addition and subtraction procedures can be based.

"The more that we share strategies the more that the children get to know others' strategies and eventually that strategy becomes their own. A child who was continually counting cubes as a strategy may then learn someone else's strategy which might be using multiples of 10 or counting backwards if they're still in the counting stage. I feel that by sharing strategies in the whole group that children learn from each other." -- Grade 2 Teacher

"They used to ask me, do I borrow here, do I carry now, and I don't hear that any more because it's their own way, and they're thinking of numbers as a whole. To them it's meaningful." -- Grade 2 Teacher

"It's very satisfying to see children come up with their own strategies. I just love it." -- Grade 2 Teacher

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