Student Work #4

This photo was taken last week, while my 1st grade class was finishing up their first math journal, getting ready to receive a new one.  On this particular day, the students were to do a specific math box that at this point, is most likely review for the majority of them.  Throughout my time with them, the class has been focusing on money as a part of their unit and because of this, most of the students are comfortable in their own ways of solving the problems involving counting coins.  Though this is true, I found it interesting that I noticed a new student, Mia, quickly start to pick up on some of the techniques that her peers had been doing the whole year.

In the photo to the left, you can see that the objective of the math box is to have students determine if Tina or Fred has more money and to then figure out how much more money the person has.  The learning goal for this problem would then be to have students think about first, just counting money and placing a number value to an object (the coin) then to use those numbers to mathematically compute who has more money and by how much.  Thinking about it now, counting change seems rather trivial, but it is important to remember that 1st graders can and do still struggle with this idea.  A strategy that was taught to the students at the beginning of the exploration involving money was to write the number value of the coin above it, then add those numbers together to get the total.  A good number of the students had caught onto that idea, but I still found it interesting that Mia would latch onto this idea as well though she was not present in your classroom when it was being explicitly taught to the rest of the class. 

From prior experience in the classroom, I would have anticipated a new student, or any 1st grade student for that matter, to determine who had more money by choosing the one who had more coins.  This means that I would anticipate the students to completely disregard the monetary value assigned to the coins and just count on strictly number of coins.  In this case, I would have expected Mia to say that both Tina and Fred had the same amount of money. 

Mia's approach to this problem informed me that she is on track, if not ahead, for her grade level.  While doing this problem, it was easy for her to see that nickels and pennies were not just objects that could be counted, but that they were objects that are worth a certain number of cents.  She also realized that she could translate the "N's" and "P's" printed on the coins to the number of cents each letter represented and add those numbers together to get the total number of cents each person had.  This method allowed Mia to come to the conclusion that Fred had more money and that he had 4 more cents than Tina. 

If I were to advance Mia's thinking I would possibly give her real coins to use so that she could put an image with the idea of counting money.  I would also give her dimes and quarters as well as nickels and pennies to see if she could decipher the difference in coins or if she could complete a similar problem with larger coins as well.