I hate to ignore ideas or make them feel unimportant when I feel they truly are. Hmmm, now, what to do? I didnвЂ™t want to explain JaneвЂ™s process without going into what is actually happening to the addends when the decimal is вЂњremovedвЂќ and then вЂњput it back inвЂќ, but I questioned whether I would be jumping too far, too quickly for some when we were just getting a handle on adding and subtracting decimals. While Jane was correct, and she understood she needed to put the numbers in the same place value, this part of her reasoning was lost in the Game. For example when adding 3.6 + 2.24, some were adding 36 + 224, arriving at 260 and having no idea where would be a sensible place for the decimal. Some students were not taking place value into account while many others were losing any concept of sense-making about their answer. However, it seemed as this idea made its way around my classroom, some very important pieces were missing. Over the course of a couple of days playing Fill Two, Empty Two, and Closest to 1, I started to hear a buzz in many studentsвЂ™ explanations that sounded much like JaneвЂ™s. I knew in our upcoming lessons we would get to this вЂњdecimal movementвЂќ when we started multiplying decimals by powers of 10 and I thought this would be a perfect example to bring back up when we got into that lesson. I made the decision to revisit this with her later in the class period to clarify her thinking and not make it a class discussion at this point. During one of our number talks a week or so ago, a student, letвЂ™s call her Jane, mentioned that she just вЂњadds and subtracts the numbers as if the decimals are not there and then puts the decimal back into her answer.вЂќ She explained it for the problem we were currently working on and we moved on. This time, a decimal addition and subtraction strategy has fallen victim to the Telephone Game. Typically, when the initial sentence makes it to the last person, it is not the same. If you have not had the pleasure of playing the Telephone Game, it goes something like this: One person whispers a sentence to another person, that person whispers the same thing (or as close as they can remember) to the next person in line, so on and so forth until it arrives back to the first person. Is there time to go deeper into that idea at this point? Is it something that arises later and this could just be a nice вЂњInteresting, that is something to think aboutвЂќ? Is it something that will lose more than half of the class and can be addressed with that student later to gauge understanding? Or is it something that will end up as a version of the Telephone Game? I deal with this in many ways and it really depends on the situation. ItвЂ™s true, it works, and you know you will get there, but my first thought is always вЂњ Do they know why? while my immediate second thought is, Oh no, now this will look faster to some of my students who will quickly grab onto it to save themselves some time, not caring why it even works. The class is sharing strategies for solving a problem and all of a sudden, one student explains his/her вЂњshortcutвЂќ or algorithm to the class. I think we have all been there (or maybe it is wishful thinking that I am not alone:)вЂ¦

Telephone game sentence examples