Student Work #3

Today in my placement, the students were misbehaving quite a bit, so they were behind in their work for the day. Because of this, my MT was beginning a math lesson just as I was leaving, so I wasn't able to collect any of their work to analyze. However, I took a picture of the chart they work on daily counting the days of schools:

Everyday, my MT and the students count the number of days of school there has been. Then they count by 5's and by 10's. As you can see, these numbers are in white to help the students see the pattern.

Last week, on the 89th day of school, one of the little boys in my class came up to me and said there were 11 more days until the 100th day of school. I asked him how he knew this, and he said because one of the whole rows was 10 days, and then there was one more day after 89, so that equaled 11.

The big idea of this daily activity the students do together is to learn different ways of counting. The students count by 1's, 5's, 10's, and they have this chart as a visual. This activity helps students master their ability to count by 1's, which is essential for many things, including basic math. The students are then practicing counting by different multiples of numbers, which is a higher-level practice than simple counting. This will in turn help the students with their basic addition and subtraction problems, allowing them to solve the problems  more quickly.

The student that told me about there being 11 days of school left until the 100th day was using his developed skills of counting by 10's to come to his conclusion. And then he was able to determine that he needed to add one more day to make 11. Both of these skills were a part of the big idea of the daily counting activity, so I was excited to see that it was working!

I have not seen my MT do one of these daily counting activities, but I would be curious to see if she did other forms of counting using multiples. I think to make this task more cognitively demanding, she could have students count by 2's, and maybe 3's as well. I think some of the students could handle 2's to a pretty high number, but it would be interesting to see how high and if they could count by 3's or not. Ideally they would be able to just look at the chart to follow along with the pattern, but seeing as my class is academically and behaviorally low, I do not know if they would all  be able to do this.