The Doorbell Rang

Last week I read Pat Hutchins book The Doorbell Rang to my class.   The students enjoyed figuring out the mental math in their heads.   It is a story about a mother who makes twelve cookies and asks her children to share them fairly.   After figuring out how many each child will get, the doorbells rings and more kiddies arrive.   As the number of children grows, the students need to re-think how the cookies can be distributed fairly.  The pattern continues throughout the book until their are 12 kids and 12 cookies and then the doorbell rings... and it is Granny bringing more cookies.

Then I taught another wonderful lesson from Marilyn Burns... (although the worksheets were self created).  I explained to the students that they were going to need to work cooperatively in groups to share paper cookies.   We talked about what cooperation looks like and sounds like.   I had 4 groups of four students and 1 group of six students.  

Once the students solved the problem of sharing a specific number of cookies, they brought me their evidence (the worksheet with cut up cookies shared equally) and I would assign them a new challenge to share a different number of cookies.

In the second block of the lesson we met back together as a class and the students shared their answers.  What was wonderful was the connection the students made to equivalent fractions.   Through looking at the multiple ways the students divided up the cookies we could see visually and symbolically equivalent fractions!