Student Work 3 - Kaitlyn Flint

The purpose of this task was for the students to both recognize the value of a nickel as well as counting by fives. This aligns with the kindergarten math standard of K.CC.4 Understand the relationship between numbers and quantity. This task is very close ended for a few reasons. First, the teacher explicitly tells the students they need to count by fives and they have a pile of 5 nickels in each space. For a student who can use rote counting by 5's, this assignment does not mean a whole lot to them cognitively demanding because they are just purely writing down what they have memorized. For students who struggle, this assignment can be quite challenging for them because there is essentially a bunch of blank lines with a picture of nickles. This worksheet does not allow students to manipulate anything to count by 5's, nor does it even let them easily count the number of nickles because they are all stacked on top of each other. Two ways to change/modify this would be to give students a problem such as "Bob has 3 nickles, how much money does he have?"" This would elicit student thinking in that they would have to know that a nickel represents 5 cents and this would also force them to count by 5's. This would also allow for the open opportunity for students to use actual nickels or objects to manipulate with because 3 nickels is a feasible object for manipulation. Once students are past needing manipulation tools, you can then move onto larger problem numbers such as "Bob has 20 nickels, how much money does he have?"
Some student approaches to this given worksheet would be to just use their rote memorization of counting by 5's and filling in the order. Another approach could be to use tallies, for example, they can tally 5 for the first line, then tally 5 more for the second line and count the tallies altogether to get the answer for the second line and so on for the rest of the paper.

The student's thinking in this worksheet is as follows:
Me: can you tell me how you figured these answers out?
Student: you had to count by fives.
Me: did you need to count in your head or did you use your fingers to count?
Student: Um, count in our head
Me: Did you use actual nickels or did you just know how to fill it in?
Student: I just know how to fill it in
Me: Was this easy for you or did you have some difficulty in it?
Student: It was pretty easy, I just looked at the numbers.
Me: Did you use the number line in the classroom?
Student: No

This interview shows me that this student had rote memorization of how to count by 5's but he may not necessarily know the meaning that a nickel means 5 cents. Using my above task modifications, that would elicit the knowledge of if he knows what the nickel representation was as well as how to count by fives.