We wondered how many students were at Burr. We represented each class of 17 with a ten block and seven ones. Then we grouped up the ones in groups of ten and traded them in for a ten block. Then we traded in the ten blocks for a hundreds block. The first time we tried, we were not paying attention and ended up with an extra hundred block--oops--we used persistance and we tried again! This time we paid attention to our precision and got 278 students. Next we looked up the answer on the Burr Website. We used what we know about reading non-fiction to look for the headings on a page. We found the heading AND we found a label in bold face with a colon after it, which means "Pay Attention! I am going to give you imprtant information!"
After we confirmed the answer for the number of students at Burr, we were curious about the other elementary school. Back to the websites! We made a graph of how many students were in each elementary school and put our answers on a number line. It is weird to have a number line start at 190! Next we had to answer how many more students were at Burr than at Haddam. We used a variety of tools to figure out the answer. Using the number line was one way to think about the problem!
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