Friday, October 29, 2010

Cookies

The beginning of 7/8 block today brought with it one of my students carrying a package of cookies into class. It's his birthday. He asked if he could share them with the class. There were enough for everyone in the class, so I said that he could.

Once the homework had been collected and the lesson was getting ready to begin, he came up to my desk to get the package of cookies to pass out to the class. I was giving two students the lesson's note packets to give to everyone in the class and heard him thinking out loud, trying to figure out how many cookies each student could have.

He asked me how many students were in the class (27, but add 2 more if you're counting adults). Then he counted up the cookies. "There are about 18 in each row....18 times 3, what's 18 times 3? Wow, look, I'm doing math!" I couldn't help but smile when I heard that.

He then went on to figure out how many cookies each person could have - it turned out to be exactly two cookies each.

I had to share his story with the class, because it was just too cute not to. The whole class applauded when I got to the part about his "ahah" moment of using math somewhere not directly related to math class.

Seventh graders are funny. :)

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