Student Work 5

 

In my kindergarten class last week the children and my mentor teacher worked on putting 100 dots on this Dalmatian doggie. The idea behind putting 100 dots was because it was the 100^th day of school. The learning goal was to see how many dots each student had to cut out in order to achieve the goal of 100 dots on the dog. This activity was designed to elicit student thinking by my MT asking the children to predict how many dots each student would have to cut out. One child said 10, one child said 3 and another child 4. My MT said lets try 4 dots per student and then we will see if we need to add more or less to our collection. There are usually 24 children in the class, but that day there were only 22. After the predictions were made, my MT had the children cut out 4 black dots each. She then went around to each student and counted the dots. The whole class counted to 88. She then asked the students how many more did they need to get to 100. My MT helped them with this problem, since it is kindergarten 100-88 is not the easiest problem for them to solve. So they got 12 as their answer for how many more they needed to cut out. My MT chose 12 more students to cut their 5^th dot and to make 100 dots total for the dog.

            Having the children predict a number of dots for the students to cut out is a good way to approach this activity. This allows the children to recognize that if they go over or less then 100 then they have to figure out how much to add or take away from the dot collection. Another way to approach this activity could be to already have 100 dots cut out and then have the children divide the dots up evenly amongst the class and the figuring out what 12 students will get the extra dots.

            Two anticipated student approaches would be guess that students get a higher number of dots then what it should be. For example some students said 10 dots per student to reach 100 and then another student said 4. The 4 was the closes number. Did the child just guess or did they have some clue of the correct amount per student? Another anticipated approach for the dividing up amongst classmate, I think some students succeed in this and then some students may give up easily. Even though it is a division problem in kindergarten, I think it would be interesting to see if they could figure it out as a team effort.

            Learning from this task, I can see they students are not at the level of subtracting numbers with more then one-place value such as 100-88. I have also learned that maybe this task is not the greatest at learning the students’ mathematical thinking. For the predications at the beginning of the lesson, my MT only asks a couple of student to share their predications.  Also making a predication is confusing because as a teacher you never know if they are just guessing at and answer or if they actually might have an idea.

            Lastly, one way to advance the students understanding could be to ask the student who is predicating, “Why did you choose that number?” Another way to advance the task is to not have a community thing to stick the dots on, but each child could have their own object and then they could decide how many dots/other items they want placed on their object. Then they’d have to collect the items and count and make sure they had the correct amount.