Student Work Blog

Today I did not get a picture of the student's work in math because they focused mostly on literacy today, except for at the very end of the day. For the last 10 minutes of the day, my mentor teacher had me do "minute math" with them. This is basically a small booklet that has story problems on each page that can be read aloud. The way my teacher works it is that the students sit in a circle and she starts with a student and goes around the circle reading aloud a math problem for each student. I thought this was a pretty neat task because the problems are all word problems that ask children to decode the problem such as ones in our CGI booklet. An example of one that I read was "There were seven cookies in a basket after Lucy baked cookies. She gave two of them to her friend Sam. How many cookies did Lucy have left?" The students were able to answer the questions fairly quickly and the only help from me that they needed was maybe a repeat of the question for clarity. Because this was a fairly quick task and something I am used to seeing from the CGI books, I only really have one question which would be:
How often are the students exposed to problems like these?
I am wondering this question because when asking my student interview questions from the CGI, I noticed that most of the students did not have trouble with word problems read in this way. Another reason I ask this is because I would assume from the ease of students answering these problems is that the teacher must do these at least once or twice a week - but I would have to ask to be sure. It seemed to be more of a "when we have time" sort of thing, but judging by their answers, I feel like it might be more often then she is leading on. The students also had no manipulates or anything to write on either which is another conclusion leading me to believe that these problems are done often enough to allow students adequate mental math practice.