Blog Post 2

After a week filled with illnesses, snow days, and half days, I have very little to report in the area of mathematics this week. The students did an activity through their literacy centers that required the use of dice to complete. The students had to roll a die and then the number they roled determined the sight word they wrote. By completing this task, the students showed they they were able to recognize the numbers 1-6 in defferent representations. Because of our lack of math this week, I also asked two children an extra question from the CGI textbook (in addition to the required interviews). The question was "10 Children were playing soccer. 6 were boys and the rest were girls. How many girls were there?" I was curious if the students would be able to attempt a math problem posed in this way. I was not allowed to take pictures of the students, only their work. Student A counted out 10 ten manipulatives and asked me to repeat the question. I did, and she said there were 6 girls too. This student's work shows me that she has the beginnings of the concept of subtraction--she knew to have 10 manipulatives (a whole to subtract a number from) but she wasn't sure of the procedure from there. The second student I asked, Student B, counted to ten on his fingers (silently--he put a new finger up each time, and mouthed the number the corresponded to each finger, but did not actually speak aloud). He then counted again (he nodded his head which showed he was counting, but he didn't move his fingers or speak out loud, so I'm not sure exactly what/how he was counting) and told me there was 2 girls on the team. This student showed me that understood some of the concept of subtraction--starting with a whole, taking some away--but needed practice/exposure to the concept of subtraction, the procedure, as well as more exposure to word problems.