All It Took Was a Hat

Today I made up my mind to relax a bit more while I was with the students and have more fun with them. I brought one of my hats that I bought in China to become a different character during math. I got this great idea this morning, thus wasn't able to get a mask or anything to really make me look different. I showed up and started the day as normal and told the kids we had a guest speaker for math today. I stepped out of the class to "go get the speaker" and put my hat on and turned right back around into the classroom. Given, I looked exactly the same, except I was wearing a hat. I introduced myself as Miss Addition (original...I know) and I heard the kids knew everything there was to know about addition. I brought my magic O's (cheerios) to see how the kids could show their number sense understanding of the place values. After seeing they understood place values, we added numbers using the magic O's. There were a few kids that I'm sure knew who I was and were playing along, but it surprised me how many actually believed I was another person. The only thing that changed was my hat. I had one girl who later made the observation: I had to be Miss Addition because Miss Addition had the same little arm. Another girl noticed "She also had the same red dots on her face like you" (Thanks for that...) The coolest part was watching the kids talk out loud the similarities of "Miss Addition" and Miss Christensen. One little girl said, "Here's how I can tell if you were pretending to be Miss Addition, take off your shoe and if there is the spots on your foot then I know you were Miss Addition. If you don't, then I know you aren't." This logic and many other comments from the students amazed me because I didn't realize how well they could think things through and solve a problem.

During the actual addition part when Miss Christensen was "locked in the bathroom" and Miss Addition was visiting, one little boy turned to me and after eating a cheerio said "Sometimes Math tastes so sweet" I wrote it on the whiteboard because I didn't want to forget it. Sometimes unpleasant things do taste sweet when we approach it from a different angle. Cheerios are not what I call sweet, but watching students explain their understanding of math definitely was! It was the greatest experience to watch the kids eyes light up when they saw "someone else" walk into the room and teach them math. All it took was a hat.