Blog Post 3

This task was the one that I conducted for my student interview. This student Ellie's task reasoning I found especially interesting. For the task I told the students that we were going to be working on an addition problem. We were going to use the bear figures as a way to represent the people in the story. The big idea of this problem was the idea of "combining" and how when you combine two things, you end up with a larger group than you first started with. Before starting this task, I anticipated that this student may use direct modeling by physically counting the number of bears with her fingers or by counting up.

With the first questions "There were 4 bears that went to the movies and 5 met them at the theater, how many bears were there total?" Ellie got the correct answer which is 9. Before she got to the answer it was obvious she was doing the problem in her head. After she gave me the correct answer I asked her how she came up with the number nine she said that she knew that she had a group of 5. And that 4 is one less than 5. She said she knew five plus five equals ten so that means if 5 plus 5 equals ten one less means the answer is 9.

The way Ellie explained it to me was not one of my anticipated answers.She took previous knowledge in knowing that 5 plus 5 equals 10 and applied it to this problem. Whether she knew it or not, she used subtraction in this join result unkown problem. She was also the student I had talekd about in a previous blog that when asked when there were 8 straws in the tens bracket how many were there she said 10 minus 2 is 8 so again she used subtraction. Out of the three students I interviewed, she was the only one to figure out the problem in this way.It may have been because she is the only one who had previous knowledge that 5 plus 5 equals ten.

When working with Ellie again on addition problems, I have to keep in mind that there is a good chance that she will in some way use subtraction to figure out her answer. I look forward to seeing how she does when they start working on subtraction in the classroom. I wonder if she is going to go about the problems in the same manner. With the second question, Ellie separated the bears into the group and counted up after starting with the number 12. So she started with 12 and counted the group of nine bears individually until she came up with the answer 21. Afterwards, Ellie was so excited to do these problems that she actually made up a story problem for me and had me figure out the answer. It is very obvious that Ellie enjoys math and finds it interesting so I look forward to working with her in the future.