A 5th grade teaching team I work with recently raised the issue of how to model the problem 1/2 x 3/10 on an array. They saw their students use a variety of models and one teacher got “bothered” by how some of the models felt “imprecise” or “not to scale.” We had a conversation together about this issue. To prepare myself for the conversation I did a little sketching of possible models that kids might use. What do you think?
Number Strings 