Goerke_Student Work #2

This is a picture of something that the children work on each day in the morning with my mentor teacher. The children are working on counting up the days of school; their goal is the 100^th day of school. They are all very excited about achieving this goal. Every morning the task is to see how many days they are at school and then make sure this number is on the correct day. So if it were the 85^th day of school they would need to make sure that there are 8 bundles of 10 in the tens column and then 5 popsicle sticks in the ones column. They all count this out together by saying, “one, two, three….” for the tens and then “one, two, three…” for the ones column. The learning goal is to pay attention to the tens and ones places and how many sticks go in each. If it were the 90^th day of school, the teacher would scaffold the rebundling by showing or asking a student how to make it so that 90 is represented with the popsicle sticks in the correct places. (9 bundles of 10 and 0 sticks in the ones place). This task does not really show individual students’ elicit thinking unless the teacher was to specifically ask an individual student how to rebundle the sticks. The teacher usually asks the class as a whole.

            The specific strategy that the teacher uses to successfully approach this task is by having the students all count the sticks as a whole. Another strategy is for if the day turned to the 90^th day, the teacher would call on a student to help figure out the rebundling of the tens so that there are 9 tens and 0 ones.

            A student might solve this by counting out the sticks in the tens and making sure it matches the correct number in the tens column of the number of the day of school. So if they know that it is the 87^th day of school, then they would count the ones to make sure there are 7 ones and then they would count the tens to make sure there are 8 bundles of tens. A possible error could be on the 90^th day, for example, where the student may not rebundle and then they may get confused with the different place values.

            This task shows that the students are currently counting the days until the 100^th day of school. This task gives them an exciting way to learn place value and the order of numbers, such as 60 then 70 then 80, etc. This shows me that because the students have learned these high of numbers, then they may be capable of counting this high.

            Lastly, two different ways to advance my students’ mathematical thinking for this task would be when they reach the 100^th or even extending it to 101 or extending it further to 120^th day. These extensions all add a different dynamic to the place value system. Another way to extent it could be to create an addition problem out of it. The teacher could ask if I was on the 85^th day yesterday and now were are on the 87^th day today, how many days have gone by? Then the students would have to add 2 to 85. My placement is kindergarten, so I am not too sure if that would be way too advanced. I’d have to try it!