This year we finally did a Mystery Skype with someone that wasn’t inside our school.  Remember that from last year?  It really was pretty cool anyway.

I have a friend, Jen Bartin, who teaches 2nd grade at another school in our district, who was looking to do her first Mystery Skype as well, and we decided a good first try would be with a mystery number rather than location.  Nope, that wouldn’t be very hard to figure out.

Unlike a typical Mystery Skype, we needed a hundreds chart instead of a map.  We got ourselves into pairs and brainstormed what kinds of questions we could ask to narrow down the number.  We had done this kind of thing before as our Math Warm-Up, as well as a game we play during Math Workshop.  The part that we hadn’t done was talk to another class over our computer while also answering questions about our own mystery number.  But we were excited and prepared.

While we chatted, kids took turns at the computer asking and answering a question.  Ja’Mia and Ella Marie were in charge of writing down the questions each class asked, and Landen and Amelia had the important task of marking the 100s chart to narrow down the choices as we got information from our answers.

It didn’t take us long, but it took them even less time to figure out our number was 62.  We did a great job of asking broad enough questions that we crossed of lots of numbers, but specific enough ones that we finally got it right.  This was fun and we were ready to do another one!!