Points for Creativity

Excuse me. I know I'm supposed to be [fill-in-the-blank with any of the 100 items on my To Do list] right now, but this is important.

I'm sitting here, totally focused and in the zone and grading and getting stuff knocked off the aforementioned To Do list, and all of a sudden, I came across something that I had to blog about. Which is how I wound up here.

Today in class, we started talking about subtraction story problems. We did an activity where I passed out an index card, gave students an equation, and had them write out a story problem to go with it.

One of the index cards has this written on it:

"I have 76 bags of fake snot. I use 48 bags of fake snot. How many fake snot bags do I have now?"

.......I'm dead serious.

But wait. It's not over. I continue on to the next index card. This one says:

"Jelly has 92 balloons. She gives Peanut Butter 54. How many does Jelly have left?"

And then our fish made an appearance:

"Brad Rudolph has 92 scales. He loses 54. How many scales does he have now?"

These are pretty good, I think to myself. I start to feel all proud of my kids' creativity. And then, just when I think it can't get any better, they add some emotion:

"I had 76 Lego Harry Potter video games. I finished 48 of them! WHOOOOOO! How many did I still not finish?"

"I had 63 fish and one was named Brad Rudolph and I loved him so much and I gave 35 away but not Brad Rudolph. How many fish do I have now?"

Cuties.