Base Ten Symmetry
Children have natural desire to use math manipulatives as playthings. We all do, in fact. The idea here is to do the normal things that teachers do with math manipulatives (base ten block, in this case), but add a design element. In these examples, the students made representations of three digit numbers and organized their base ten blocks into symmetrical robots. It isn't necessary to do robots or to have them be symmetrical; that's just what we did on this day. We also combined robots into mega-robots and discussed their names and special powers. In these examples, the students improvised quick base ten blocks from construction paper.