Differentiation and Creativity in Math Name Collection Boxes

By Alyssa Charles

Differentiation is a hot topic in education right now.  Every learner is an individual and learns different concepts in unique ways. Creating and creativity have the top spot in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, which identifies higher order thinking skills we want our students to have. One of my favorite exercises in our Everyday Math program has students engaging in both differentiated and creative ways by thinking of different names for numbers. Name collection boxes give the student a number and they have to think of other ways to make that number through words, pictures, symbols, arithmetic, etc.    

Over the course of Lower School, students' methods get more sophisticated as their fluency of thought and math skills are enriched. Differentiation and creativity are so easily implemented in this lesson.  Sometimes students need a little push to get beyond writing 11+1 for the number 12.  It’s easy and it works, but by setting some parameters, the exercise challenges the students and makes it more fun. Here, fourth graders try to write other names for numbers with the following parameters set:

• if they choose addition and subtraction, they must have at least 3 terms (2 operations)
• they may only use the specified numbers that are listed from rolling a 30-sided die
• all of the numbers used must be even.  

There are so many ways to change the parameters and differentiate based on an individual’s or group’s demonstrable skills.