What Proof With Little Kids Looks Like

Way back in October, Kate asked: What does proof with little kids looks like?

Here's an answer from some of my fourth graders:



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Here's the lesson:

I walked in to class and told the kids that I had been walking down the street and found scraps of kids' subtraction work. I smiled. They asked if I was lying, and I lied and said that I wasn't. Then I said, also I found the original problem. They thought this shtick was pretty ridiculous. Anyway, I gave them this:

They did this:

                                      

Then we went through each "kid"'s work and predicted what the rest of their work was going to look like. Then I revealed it, and we tried to figure out what the kid did.

 

Ben Blum-Smith wants us to name our problem-writing techniques, so I'll file this one under "hide the math."

[The source for those pictures was this really great NCTM article, by the way.]