Co-Teaching Lesson: Coin Combinations (Lori/Nakebah)

This is the 3-part lesson we observed during our co-teaching session with Lori and Nakebah at  Glen Ravine.

All materials from our co-teaching session can be found through these links:
Lesson plan
KWC Chart
Assessment for Learning Template

Prior to the lesson:
Students in Lori's class had been learning about money and coin combinations prior to this lesson. This lesson is a consolidation task.

Part 1: Activation of Prior Knowledge

The goal of this part of the lesson was to activate students' prior knowledge about:

- name and value of each coin

- how to combine coins to make a totalLori showed the whole class each coin and asked for the name and value.

So Lori started by showing the kids a coin and asking them for the name and value of it.

Then she asked: What if I have $1.50 in coins.  What are all the possible combination of coins I could have?

Ask students shared their thinking, Lori recorded the combinations on chart paper.

Part 2: Working on It
Lori introduced the problem to the whole class and gave each pair a copy of the problem to read over.  She then co-constructed the KWC chart with the whole class so they can understand the problem.

Lori also co-constructed the success criteria with students by asking: what do need to do to be successful in this task? 

The class had some prior experiences working with success criteria.
Lori did not edit any of their thinking.

Part 3: Reflecting and Connecting
Based on what we observed in student work, we decided on the following four pairs to share their thinking with the class during the math congress (this is the exact order).

Guess and Check

Intentional Substitution

Two combinations: This pair couldn't express to us what their strategy was prior to the math congress.  However, they shared that they actually used the first pair's strategy (guess and check)!

Two Combinations.  Followed the success criteria to a tee!

Explicit Teaching:

After each pair shared, Lori and Nakebah consolidated the lesson by referring to these key ideas:

- Guess and check is a good strategy to use to get started when you don't know what to do.

- There are different ways to represent money amounts (numbers, pictures, words)