Work Blog 2

Every morning during calendar time, my MT has the students count how many days they have been in school. She does this by using straws and once the students get to ten in the ones place, they take a rubber band. bundle it up and put in into the tens place. But first she has them guess how what the next number would be for the day. On this day for example, she said yesterday they had eight bundles of ten and four ones how many bundles of ten and ones will we have today?

One of the students raised their hand and said 85 which is correct. The teacher repeats the students answer and says yes if we have 8 bundles of ten and 4 ones and we had one more to the ones pocket we get the number 85 which means we have been in school for 85 days.

However, after she reviewed this, she asked the students how they come up with the number 85 and their responses were really interesting to me and solidified what we have been learning in class that students figure things out different ways. One student said she took 4 ones and added one more and knew that was five. Another student said the same thing but then added on that the tens pocket didn't change because we need ten ones to add another to the tens pocket. Another student raised her hand and she said well I know that 4 is 1 away from 5 so if you add one day it would be 85. These answers prove that students used both addition and subtraction just to figure out this simple math problem in their head.

While this is just a simple math task that the students take part in everyday, it really opened my eyes to the fact that as a teacher I have to make sure that I explain math in many different ways. Students will understand things differently than others. These students are kindergarteners and their already finding their own way to work out a problem. I look forward to the future and finding out different ways the students do math!