Which One Doesn’t Belong – Fraction Edition

My classes have been using a WODB board this year.  The board has been a permanent fixture in my room and it has been up since August.  I came across the idea last year after reading Christopher’s idea and Joel’s example.  I’m finding that it has been a great routine for my 3-5th grade math students.  My goal was to change my WODB bulletin board every  week, but it’s really being changed around 2-3 weeks or so.  My boards started out as mainly shapes, but has moved to numbers and equations recently. Changing it less gives kids time to see other options and add more notes.

My third grade students are in the middle of a unit on fractions.  They used number lines to multiply fractions by whole numbers earlier in the week.  The students are becoming better at multiplying fractions using visual models, although some are more wanting to multiply the numerators and denominators.

Today, the students completed an individual Which One Doesn’t Belong task.  I’ve heard of other classes doing something similar, so I thought it might work well with my kids. Students were given a criteria for success page and then asked a bunch of questions.

Students were asked to create four different fraction multiplication models.  Students then created two different solutions for the WODB prompt.  After a brief amount of modeling, students started to create their own WODB boards.  Many students had questions about what could count for solutions?  I put it back on the students to figure out if their solutions were appropriate or not. For the most part, students did a fine job finding two different solutions.

Students then wrote down their solutions and folded the paper to hide them.

The students took pictures and put them in their SeeSaw accounts.  Next week, the kids will look at each others’ responses and see if their solutions match. I’m looking forward to what they observe.