Cookie Counting

This was part of the math lesson that my kindergartners had for today. I saw the students working on their counting skills, working on their writing numerical values skills, and associating a counted number with the actual written number. I think by this point the teacher is looking for the students to have mastered counting up to 20. Majority of the class is getting to the point where they have mastered this. 

I see that the wks has ten cookies in a row before starting another line. I think that the ten cookies in a row help the student see ten and in their mind bundle those ten cookies (or what they have been practicing is bundling straws for counting the days of school). 

I see this as just a basic worksheet. I interpret it and completely believe that it's purpose is simply practice of counting. Something that I saw the substitute teacher do was have the students make more on the back when they were done. I think it was just to keep the faster students busy while the others were finishing up their worksheet. What I did a few, but not all students, was they would make the cookies, I would give them my answer and they then would have to count them to check and make sure that I got it correct. 

My three questions about this task would be:

1. How can this task be furthered or built off of?

2. How does this help all the students in the class (high level math students are not challenged while the low level students are struggling)?

3. What could be a more hands on task added to this task?

I think that the substitute teacher's having the children create their own idea could have been a way to build off of it, if there was more structure added and planned. 

I think that the worksheets needed to be altered to higher numbers for the high level and lower numbers for the lower level students.

Having the kids find different object that represented the same number could be a fun, hands on way to help the students visually associate the quantity with the actual number.