Add Town Years K - 7

Summary With a bit of imagination, an array of Poly Plug red boards is seen as intersections of streets in Add Town. Children learn how the people of Add Town must arrange themselves when they are on the intersections and soon find themselves in the challenging situation of using an addition chart. The activity dovetails perfectly with Maths300 Lesson 156, Chart Strategies. Suitable for threading. Materials One Poly Plug per pair Plus card as shown Digit cards 1 - 5 (with repeats) Digit cards 6 - 10 (with repeats) Times card for extension

Special Note

Several photos in this activity were taken in a class of Prep children half way through the year, ie: the students were 5 - 6 years old. The children worked happily and purposefully on the activity for about an hour. There is also comment below from a teacher who used the activity over several sessions in a Year 4 class and developed worksheets to support the activity, which she has shared.

Ask the children with the digit cards to choose the street they want and indicate where the names (digit cards) should go. (By convention, number charts operate from the numbers on the left and the top.) Demonstrate using your fingers, or perhaps a doll, that when people in Add Town stand on an intersection...

They can look this way and see one street name and this way and see the other street name.

In Add Town they work out how many people should stand on an intersection - a red board - by adding up the two street numbers they can see. We can use the yellow and blue plugs to be people.

Can you use the two colours to show me the two numbers for this board, ...and this one, ...and...?

• It is likely that you will have to explain a couple of times - by putting your head down? - that the two street names tell you how many people should be on each red board.
• The photo above is the finished and agreed arrangement in a Prep class. It took 5 - 10 minutes to get to this stage. The whole class was involved sitting in a circle on the mat around Add Town.

Modelling Recording For this phase of the activity it is best if the whiteboard is directly above Add Town so that the children are looking across Add Town and up to the whiteboard. Now we are going to make a map of Add Town and show how the people were arranged. Ask the children how many intersections there are in Add Town today and draw them on the whiteboard. Of course we have to put our plus sign here so we know this is Add Town. Continue to build up the street names by asking which one goes where and, as far as possible, asking children to come up and write them.

Now I want you to draw Add Town in your own book, just like this, and I want you to show me the people.

Unquestionably, at this stage every one of my Preps knew exactly what was expected. They set to work doing their drawings with confidence and enthusiasm.

Some students use plugs first. Others go straight to numerals. The intended outcome is that all will use numerals. There will be some students who need further encouragement to 'put their head down' in a 'square' to look both ways and see the street names. Encourage children to use their calculator to check that the number in each square is correct.

Reflection
Round off this visit to Add Town by returning to the mat and asking students to help you write the people numbers in the boxes. Discuss what can be seen. For example, in the case above, the number 7 will appear twice so both additions, 3 + 4 = 7 and 5 + 2 = 7 should be recorded on the board.

Extensions

1. Revisit Add Town many times first changing the street names, then making the town bigger, 3 x 3.
2. To decrease the amount of book space used for recording, you might want to design a recording sheet, or make Add Town books by stapling seconds paper printed on one side. If you make these with a card cover, the children can create their own cover design.
3. Introduce backwards questions where only part of Add Town is known and the children have to work out the missing parts. For example, these screens are from the Chart Strategies software which provides a wealth of these problem solving challenges.

Note: Introducing backwards charts is like doing the above 'map' backwards. Write the chart up on the board (or display it from the software) with the children sitting in the mat on the circle. Put the empty red boards down on the floor with the plus sign and any known street names. Put plug people where they are known and use the clues in the chart to sort out the colours and the missing parts of Add Town. There is so much opportunity for mathematical discussion.

4. Children use the Chart Strategies software.

Start the whole process over again by visiting Times Town where the people meet on the intersections to line up in equal rows. The left number tells the number of rows and the top number tells how many in each row. So the two sets of people shown are in 1 row of 3 (1 x 3) and 4 rows of 2 (4 x 2).

Add Town in Year 4 As part of a 6 day professional development program which included classroom trialling sandwiched between each pair of days, Nichola Brandon, St. Benedict's Primary School, Narrabundah, ACT used Add Town/Times Town over several sessions with her Year 4 class. She worked with the children on both the Interactive Whiteboard and on the floor and developed worksheets to support her children to move from the concrete to the abstract. In her report at Days 3 & 4 of the course, Nichola made these comments: Add town is an activity that assists students with simple addition. During the sessions in which I engaged my students with this activity, not only did their simple addition strategies develop, but they formed a deeper understanding of the relationship between add and subtract as well as developing multiplication and division skills. By Session 3, after a few goes at different intersections, some students asked if they could stop using the plugs. They were finding the process of the plugs too slow for their thinking and wanted to move quickly. The students then were given an option of working the sums out and I had some students continue with the plugs and others work without. I found this very affirming as it pointed out the children in my group who are still working through the concrete stage, and which students had moved to the perceptual stage. Session 4 introduced the working backwards problems, supported by a worksheet. Session 5 developed the activity into Times Town with emphasis was on arrays. By Session 6, again the students had become very familiar with the task and preferred to continue the worksheet mentally. I found this particular session very useful as it assisted in developing an increased speed at which students could solve their multiplication facts. It also deepened student's understanding of arrays and (commutative) multiplication pairs. Nichola has shared these worksheets too: Add Town Blank Add Town with Numbers Add Town Backwards Add Town Extension to Times Town Add Town Extension to Times Town with Numbers

          

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