Lunch conversations

I have the pleasure of spending my lunch duty with our fifth grade students.  They are a great group of kids but have a tendency to get a little noisy and sometimes lack appropriate conversation topics.  To help them have a topic for conversation at their tables, I found some "conversation starters" (i.e., math problems) from the Investigations series for them to discuss.  I love these problems because there are multiple correct answers and they were easy for students to try without paper and pencil to record their thinking.

At first, the students wanted to share their answers with me.  As I asked whether others at their table agreed with their possible solution, students began to ask one another about the answers.  This was fantastic!  Rather than viewing me as the keeper of the answers, the students began to reason about the problem with one another and build their understanding together.

Another benefit was that students in other grades talked about the problems as well.  Students were practicing counting skills, math reasoning, and many of the mathematical practices all while eating lunch!  I hope you will consider trying to find a way to involve more conversations about math at your school!

Here are some examples of the problems we used: