When consolidating work on our Bansho wall, we discovered that students used one of three strategies to solve the problem:

1) Images/ Manipulatives: students represented the pictograph using counters and then tallied the total number of counters to get the answer. 

2) Addition: students wrote addition sentences to solve the problem (e.g. 4+2 (half a symbol) +4+4+2+4+4+4+4+4=36).

3) Skip counting- students used skip counting understanding that each symbol either represented 4 or 2 students (depending on which question they answered). Students also had to understand the value of half a symbol.