My MT asked me to work with a struggling student. I pulled her into the hallway and provided her with manipulatives to practice the addition problems. The transcription is below.
Me: "Here are some hearts you can use if you want to help you solve these math problems! Here's the first one, Mary had 3 hearts and John had 2. How many hearts did they have all together?"
Child W: "Umm well 3. 1, 2, 3." (counting out 3 hearts.) "Then two. So that's two. 1, 2, 3. (counting the hearts she already counted again) the answer's 3."
Me: "Tell me about why you're thinking it's three?"
Child W: "Well because I counted out 3 hearts."
Me: "What about the 2 hearts that John had?"
Child W: "Yeah I counted."
This child is unable to directly represent this simple addition problem. This is very concerning to my MT because she is unable to create two groups of items to count and add together. My MT told me that the next step for this child will be to actually model directly representing addition with objects. She feels that if the student cannot visualize the addition problem concretely, she will not be able to do to in her head; therefore, she needs it to be modeled. Although modeling would not be a high level task, the student seems to be very confused, and I can't think of another way to teach her this without explicitly showing her.
Think about other questions that you might ask the student. What do you think she is currently thinking as she does the problem? What are alternative ways of thinking about it? How might you help the child see the connection between these different representations?
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