At the event, I created a station called Expression Posters. At the station, I hung up five posters each with a different number: 5, 7, 9, 10, and 12. The photo to the left reflects how I hung up the posters. I needed to make sure students were able to reach them.

At the Expression Posters table, I had three different stacks of expressions for students to solve which were color-coded according to grade band: K/1 was yellow, 2/3 was green, and 4/5 was blue. That made it easy for the Station Facilitator to hand out an appropriate expression to students who visited the station.

The solutions to the expressions matched one of the numbers on the posters. For example, the solution to 1 + 4 is 5 so the student would add their expression to the ‘5’ poster. To encourage students to participate, each student who solved an expression was given a glow stick of their chosen color. It was a huge hit!

To help with scaffolding, I included a 0-15 number line on each of the Beginning expression cards and made available 0-120 charts for the Intermediate and Advanced levels.

I also included thinking paper and pencils so students could draw pictures or “number crunch” as they solved the problem. The photo to the left shows one student using the thinking paper to help solve his expression.

Next time I would add blank cards so that students who were interested could come up with their own expression and add it to one of the posters.

All in all, it was a fun way to get in some extra number sense work but to also show that there’s an infinite number of ways to express any given number. It was fun to watch the posters fill up with different expressions.