Facilitating Failure

This week, I posted about a cool LEGO math activity I did recently with my first graders. One of my kids -- a first-grader determined to learn square roots, as he believes himself to already be the master of lesser maths -- was not satisfied with a two- or three-digit number. Nope -- he wanted to go to five digits.

So, I let him. Did I know it would be nearly impossible to do in our limited time, with our limited number of LEGOs? Of course. And I didn't say yes because I wanted him to fail at his choice -- this wasn't a cheap opportunity to tell him "I told you so -- now, learn what I tell you."

Instead, I figured it would be a great "teaching moment" for him to really understand the idea of exponential growth behind place values.

First, he picked a number in the 50,000s. He quickly revised that downward to 10,000 -- still quite the feat to accomplish with LEGO studs.

We added. We skip-counted and multiplied (he is gifted at math). We never made it to five digits, but I think, using the available base plates, that we made it to around 2,000 studs before he had to go back to class.

Sure, he failed at his original task -- building a five-digit number. But he and the two girls with him all left with a great understanding of just how huge a number 10,000 is.

Sometimes we learn more by failing than succeeding -- an important lesson I try to teach my GT kids, and one I often need to remember myself.