Bags of Lollies

I recently drew a bag of lollies like the one shown below, blew it up to A3 size and took several copies (mine were laminated because I knew I would want to use them lots of times) into a classroom. I have found that students of all ages but particularly the younger ones engage with narrative and have begun wherever possible to create narratives to present problematised situations. The following is the narrative presented.

Recently I visited a Lolly factory where a worker was packing 25 lollies into each bag. Unfortunately the lolly packer never worked hard at school and could not put 25 into each bag. The lolly packer made all sorts of counting mistakes. I said I would ask the smart children that I work with for some ideas so can you help me find the best ways of counting please?

I began by asking the students to estimate how many lollies were in the bag and suggest ways of counting them. The first student to try to count began to double dip and to forget which lollies were already counted. This allowed the class to suggest strategies to overcome this. Strategies included marking the counted ones and given that I kept interrupting the person counting (which caused a lot of laughter) a strategy for writing numbers in each lolly so that there could be no further miscounting. When asked if there was a faster way of counting it was suggested that we should count by twos. Again this was problematic because the lollies are not neatly organised to make it easy to touch two at a time while counting. Eventually a strategy for joining pairs was arrived at and counting could take place. We briefly reviewed the earlier estimates and talked about why some estimates might have been closer than others and about what they could do next time the have to make an estimate.

Joining and marking the lollies seemed to prompt some new ideas and soon colouring in fives and later in tens gave new methods of counting. I had wanted this background because the problematised situation I had in mind could build on these ideas.

The children were asked to draw a bag like mine and to draw lollies in it until I asked them to stop. We reviewed the need for the lollies to be a reasonable size and spaced so that there were no overlaps and some space around each lolly. At a time when some students had still only a few lollies on their paper and others had more than twenty-five I stopped the class and asked them to put themselves in the role of the lolly packer and make sure that there were exactly 25 in their bag. The children were asked to change to a different colour to carry our their fix up strategy so that we could see how that went about it.

As mentioned previously, this activity provided a useful opportunity to demonstrate to the children that fixing up an error is not only okay but also part of everyday situations.