Today my mentor teacher introduced a new section of math centers. This was given to the higher level math students.
What the students are doing is called "Missing Numbers Down on the Farm". All four students had a magnifying glass and the "Missing Numbers Down on the Farm" sheet. They looked with the magnifying glass and found numbers listed like 11 12 __ and other three sets of numbers in order ranging from 0-20 for two of the students and 0-15 for the other two. On their worksheets they would write down the number set they found and then have to write the third missing number.
When trying to think about how this center is getting to the Big Picture, I thought that this center is helping the students with math fundamentals. They are not only identifying the numbers, but having to solve what number comes next. The students did pretty well with this task, only having one or two wrong or unreadable answers. The one thing that I noticed was these high leveled students had trouble with the number writing. They wrote their 6s, 2s, and 3s backwards. When I drew their attention to it, they automatically knew what they did wrong and changed it.
It's really not at all clear to me what this task was asking students to do or what the learning objective for such a task might be. Again, this might be hard to decode in a task like this, but try to express it as clearly as you can, specifically, by focusing less on the procedure of the task and more on the actual mathematical relationships and concepts involved in the student work and thinking.
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