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Activity 1

Standards Alignment

Building On

Addressing

Instructional Routines

None

Materials

To Gather

Connecting cubes

Activity Narrative

The purpose of this activity is to look for patterns in decompositions. The decompositions in the activity are presented in a way to encourage students to look for patterns, such as one addend getting larger while the other gets smaller, and use this information to determine if there are other possible decompositions. When students look for patterns, they look for and make use of structure (MP7). When they write expressions to represent diagrams they reason abstractly and quantitatively (MP2).

MLR8 Discussion Supports. Invite students to begin partner interactions by repeating the question, “What pattern do you notice?” This gives both students an opportunity to produce language.
Advances: Conversing

Launch

Groups of 2
Give students access to connecting cubes.
“Andre and Priya snapped a tower with 8 cubes. They used 2 different colors to show how they broke their tower each time. Write an expression to represent the 2 parts that they snapped each tower into.”
2 minutes: partner work time
“Look at the cubes and the expressions. What patterns do you notice?” (There are more yellow each time. There is 1 more yellow and 1 fewer blue each time. The first number in the expression is getting bigger)