Swimming in the Cracks of Math

Late last year a group of grade 3 students were doing some fraction challenges and one student, whom we’ll call H., was becoming quite enthusiastic about deconstructing the completed challenges of other students. Some of said challenges are pictured below. H. deconstructed the first image, of a turtle, thusly: “Two green make one blue, there are 4 blue so there should be eight green so it is half green even though there are more green pieces — it’s cool to see what’s going on behind the scenes!” At the end of the class, the student said that they had been “swimming in the cracks of math”. Beautiful.