This week I got to see the students do their math centers. They have four to five math centers each day, so I am going to focus on one station for the next four or five blogs. This week I focused on stair counting. They have counting blocks that they can stick together, and they are to use these blocks to create stairs, as pictured above. The stairs start at one, and then go to two, three, ect. They are supposed to make them all the way up to twenty, to demonstrate they know how to count to twenty. There were five kids at this station, and four only got to about ten or twelve. Only one child got to about sixteen before they had to clean up. The students did great at this, and it seemed really easy for them, but as they got to higher and higher numbers, they would quit counting and just measure one block higher than the last stack, which I saw as a flaw in the station.
This is a very interesting task, and your pictures do a great job of capturing what the students are actually doing. What is missing from this analysis though is any analysis of the actual mathematical thinking that students seemed to evidence through this task. What did you notice as they were working on this task? What do you think it revealed about their current mathematical understandings?
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