Stephanie Wilson - Student Work #2

At the beginning of this lesson, my MT asked the students a poll question: Do you like warm weather or cold weather? The students wrote their names on the white board under whichever one they chose. Afterwards, they were given this worksheet to fill out as a class following along with the teacher, who was working on the overhead. Students were asked to color in the suns for the number of students who chose warm weather, and color in the snowflakes for the number of students who chose cold weather. Then they were told to tally the amount in each category.

The big idea of this assignment was to demonstrate multiple ways of representing a number or group of people: the students each wrote their names under which category they chose, they filled in the suns/snowflakes, and they tallied the numbers up. The purpose of this assignment was to get students to think about different ways that they are able to count things. The tallying portion was the most important part of this assignment in my opinion because the students work on tallying every morning during calendar time (as a way of counting the days of the school year), and this was a way to determine if the students were understanding the process of this. Most of the students seemed to have a fairly good grasp of the concept of tallying, although some of them struggled a little with the crossing tally to make a set of 5 and then counting by these tallies.

This particular student was brand new to the classroom starting today, and it was extremely obvious that he was above-average compared to the rest of the class. He was easily able to do this assignment, although you can see that he was not up-to-par with tallying as the rest of the class was. His work is in blue, and I showed him the correct way to tally this number in the orange. The cause of this was probably that his old school did not spend time on tallying that my class does. So he will need to work on this task more, but I think he will be able to pick it up very quickly.

Since my classroom as a whole is at a low level academically, my teacher had to physically do the work with the students and have them copy exactly what she was doing. This in itself is an extremely low-level practice, because the students are not asked to apply themselves in any way other than simply copying the answer. I think in order to make this task more cognitively demanding, the obvious solution would be to make the students complete this task on their own. But another way to do this would be to have students come up with more ways to represent this poll. For example, they could make a circle graph, bar graph, etc.