The task that these students were doing was called "build it, change it". The students worked in partners and the first partner would draw a card. In this instance, the student drew a four so she put four chips down onto the mat. The second student had to change it, so she drew a seven and had to turn the four chips into seven chips on the board. They continued this until they were finished with the entire deck. The point of this task is to introduce "taking away or adding" to a number to get something different. I liked this task because it made students think about why they had to add chips to the original number or take away chips from the original number. When I was working with these two students, I asked them how they knew which to do and they responded with, "seven is bigger than four, so you need to add chips to get up to seven". Their reasoning showed me that they understood the purpose of this task and understood the basic concepts of addition/subtraction.
Three questions
1. Do all of the students understand that this task introduces adding/subtracting?
2. How can this task be altered to help the students that may be struggling?
3. How could this task be expanded to further their knowledge?
1. It would be helpful to walk around to every group, and ask how they know you need to add/take away chips to get to the second number. It also may be helpful to use different ojects or different variations of this concept to see if they can still do the same things, but with different tools/resources.
2. to help students that may be struggling, it may be helpful to use smaller numbers or to walk them through the process one-on-one. Sometimes, students learn better when they can see how the task is supposed to be completed. I could also be a partner with one of the students and state what I am doing as we are doing the task.
3. To further their knowledge and learning with this task, you could have students add the two numbers together, to find the sum. One student could draw a card and place the chips down, then the second student could draw another card and add that many chips to the board. Together, the students could count the total number of chips to see what X + Y equals.
A very thoughtful analysis.
ReplyDeleteAlso think about the questions you asked them...What other questions might you ask, specifically to the students who may be struggling? What misconceptions might they have? What might be some good questions to help address those misconceptions?
Also, think about what a "debrief" for such a task might look like...What big idea would you want to lead the students to think about? What strategies / solutions / representations of this game would you like to sequence to lead towards this desired goal?