Number Jump- Jamie Blankenship

One part of the kindergartners' daily schedule is something called the number jump.  First, my mentor teacher will call out a certain number, on Friday the number was 82. Then, there are strips of tape on the floor that form a large square.  The students stand on this tape in a square and the helper of the day begins. He starts by saying the number 1 while he jumps.  The student next to him has to jump while saying number 2. This continues counting up and going from student to student until they reach 82.  If a student miscounts, he or she  must sit down.  Eventually, a student will say the number of the day, in this case, 82, and win a prize. This activity really gets students moving around while they practice counting.  They also have to be able to know what number comes next, by listening to their classmates count the numbers. I think this activity, along with other counting practice has really brought the students a long way from how they counted at the beginning of the year.  Most of the students are able to participate in the number jump for the majority of the time.  Students who get "out" will usually say the wrong tens place or will say a number that is completely unrelated to the number that is supposed to be said.  For example, with the tens place, a student might say 19 when the number should be 49. I wonder why this happens? It could be possible, since these students who make this error often have trouble counting above 20 or 30, that they know what the number should end in, but that they don't know how to say that number.  To find out more about why this is happening, you could ask the student, How did you get from 48 to 19? Are those first numbers in both of those numbers the same? Should they be the same when you are counting up? Although this is a very interactive task that students really enjoy, it is not a high level task.  Some questions I would ask is, how would you make this a high level task? and also, Does this activity need to be a high level task? When answering these questions, I honestly don't know if this task could be made into a higher level task. Counting during this activity seems to be a way to add in a little bit of some extra practice to the rest of the counting activities that the students do.