Monster Math

Last week divisions 1 and 2 explored the book You Can Count on Monsters by Richard Evan Schwartz. This book focuses on the math concepts of prime and composite numbers.

The students designed their own prime number monster bookmarks...can you tell what prime number each bookmark represents?

(clue...the monster above still has one more tooth to add)

Could you tell how many teeth that one monster had? That would be 101!

Today, the students solved a math problem involving cookies and monsters. The focus of the task was for students to approach the problem in different ways and communicate and represent their mathematical thinking.

The problem goes like this...
Three tired and hungry monsters went to sleep with a bag of cookies. One monster woke up, ate 1/3 of the cookies and went back to sleep. Later, a second monster woke up and 1/3 of the remaining cookies, then went back to sleep. Finally, the third monster woke up and ate 1/3 of the remaining cookies. When she was finished, there were 8 cookies left.  How many cookies were in the bag originally?

The students worked in groups to talk about where to start with this problem and approaches such as "work backwards" and "guess and check" were used. The students reasoned that the original number of cookies needed to be a multiple of 3 or 9. Here's a couple of example of how students represented how they solved the problem:

-Ms Novakowski