Student Work Blog #2 - Amy Tenbrink

I was not able to go to my classroom last week, because of school closings and the fact that they didn't have school on Friday because of report cards and such. I would, however, like to talk about some things I found in my math interviews two weeks ago when I did them with different children. I found that it is fairly easy to gauge a child's confidence in math just by how high they say they can count to. In my previous blog I talked about how each day the class does calendar time, and specifically the part of calendar time where they count as a group up to a certain number each day. When they do this, it's hard to pick out who actually understands the counting concept, and who is just copying the class, or just moving their mouth, and doesn't actually understand. Individually, however, you can definitely tell who understands and who doesn't. Asking students how high they can count is an easy way to see their confidence in counting and numbers. One child, Steve (pseudonym) originally had said he could only count to three, but previously he had told me correctly that there were five objects in a picture. When I pointed this out he changed his answer to five. When I asked why, he refused to give me a reason. This showed me that he is not very confident in his counting abilities, and that he needs help gaining counting confidence. On the other hand, another student, Joseph (again, pseudonym) told me that he could count to 80. When I asked him to count to 80, he got to 39, and then skipped all of the 40's and went straight to 50, and then repeated the 50's two times, then said 80 and was done. Even though he was wrong, he showed confidence by attempting to count higher than he actually could.