Week 2 Post Student Blog-Donny By Casey Droste

 

I am in a 6^th grade classroom and we are currently working on graphing, coordinates and quadrants.  The work I will show you is a homework assignment that was handed back today.  This student, Donny, has some struggles in school.  Donny is emotionally impaired, he gets easily upset and has to leave the room for short-long periods of time.  This seems to put quite a large damper on his learning, sometime when he can do the work he seems to be quite bright and other times he struggles a lot. 

Now this assignment Donny did not do so well on if you are just looking for the correct answer but I think once we analyze it we will understand what he is having trouble with.

For most of the problems Donny got wrong were because he did not answer the right question, a few questions as which quadrant are certain points in and Donny just wrote the coordinates for one of the points.  Now he did not write the correct coordinates in this instance but I think I can see his confusion in these answers as well as the answers to other questions.  For questions 1 and 2 on page 8 I feel Donny thought to write the coordinates for N & M, (2, -4) & (-4, 2) the real coordinates should be (2, -5) & (-2, -4).  The line if only labeled at –2 for the bottom portion of the graph and I wonder if Donny got confused and assumed that both M & N were on the y –4 point and then he saw that one was on the positive side of x and one on the negative side.  He did something similar on page 4 he thought point P was on the x 4 coordinate but it was really x 5 and same goes for S. 

I feel that the teachers goal from this worksheet was to have students identify the 4 quadrants correctly and be able to identify coordinates of a point.  Now they are working more on graphing the points themselves.  I think that Donny did this backwards from what was expected, which is not a bad thing.  Donny is quite confident graphing coordinates but is having trouble with labeling/finding the coordinates of a given point.

I worked with Donny today on graphing points and he did an excellent job being able to graph the coordinates in their correct spot.  And this shows in problems 5-10 on page 4. 

I am thinking that Donny needs help reading through the problems to truly understand what they are asking.  I think giving him problems similar to 1 & 2 on page 8 and walking through them together, getting an idea for what he sees when he reads them, what he thinks they are asking would be helpful. 

After watching him work today I started to believe that Donny has no trouble graphing points and he can understand them on a blank slate but when he has a million dots on a graph he may get confused and overwhelmed which causes him to mix up coordinates.  To help with this I would like to design an exercise that starts off with Donny graphing coordinates, to give him some confidence with the graph and then give him a problem like 11-18 and give him guidance along the way, possibly include a graph with all lines marked to make sure he is clear on what every line actually is.