Playing with the number Nine in Grade 1

My mentoring moment of the week  definitely has to be the Mathematics Nine Village the Grade 1's did. They were learning about the bonds of nine and had to create a village using coloured paper, 3 shapes (a square, rectangle and a triangle) to form a house. They were allowed to stick these shapes however they wanted to, but making sure that they are creating a village of nine houses/huts.  After forming the huts/houses they wrote out the bonds of nine, but not necessarily the bonds that consisted of two numbers. They could choose more than two numbers and decide if they should write addition or subtraction sums or both - they had to choose. For resources they used their counters to help them form the different numbers. Another  fun part of the lesson was when they created a name for their village! Creative names that came up included: Nine City, Nine America, Ninena. It was a very interesting lesson.