This week in my placement classroom the students have been working on math facts, more particularly quickly knowing double math facts like 1+1, 2+2, ... , 8+8, 9+9, and 10+10. The goal of this worksheet is to get students to practice their addition facts of 8's and 9's. Most students were working on this assignment independently.


When walking around the classroom observing the students I notice one student Nate was done way before the other students. I quickly looked over Nate's work and it was completed correctly. I then asked Nate how did he get done so fast. He said "I figured out a little short cut". This caught my attention so I asked Nate to please explain to me his method. Nate said that he knew that 0+8=8 and if you add one more to 0 you get 1, and 1+8=9 which is one more then 8. So, if you add one to the number that is being adding to 8 then your answer will be one more. Not thinking of answering the questions this way, I was very impressed with Nate's observation and figuring out this little trick. The other students did not use this method with working through these problems.

The purpose of this assignment was to get students to work through these math facts and practice the knowledge of 8 and 9 addition facts. Students have been working on these facts and most of them can figure the answer out but some of the students are having real difficulty.

However, Nate's method was very clever and I give him prompts for figuring it out, but my worry is that Nate was just adding one to each number without actually knowing the math fact. I have come to the conclusion that Nate does probably know his 8 and 9 math facts. He usually does very well when it comes to math and he overall is a clever little boy. Maybe this worksheet was not the best to give to students. Students who know 8+0 may not know 8+7, but can figure the answer out using Nate's method. If we really want to test students knowledge of these facts then give them a worksheet that will actually test their knowledge of these facts and not a worksheet like this one where they can find different strategies to figure out the answer. Nate's way was smart, but does it really show Nate's knowledge of these math facts?