Weekly Blog

For this week's blog post, I was unable to obtain any student work.  I usually have my placements on the Monday before the blog is due, and the students are on spring break this week.  In my classroom, the students are being introduced to addition and subtraction.  They have been working on adding numbers and taking away numbers during a variety of different activities during math workshop.  One activity has students work with a partner where they draw cards and have to add chips to a board to find a new number.  Another activity is a worksheet that students fill out and it introduces the idea of "difference", which relates to subtraction.  A lot of the students have been finishing the activities successfully and it seems that most of the students are understanding the basic concepts of addition and subtraction.  This is definitely a harder task and with kindergarten, it is important that each student will understand the process involved with addition and subtraction.  After spring break, my MT and I are going to introduce story problems to students.  With this, we are going to have the students do simple addition problems first; such as, "Two bears were playing outside, one bear joined them outside. How many bears are playing?"  They will be able to use counting chips or counting bears, pencil and paper, etc. to solve this problem.  A lot of the students cannot count up/down in their heads, so they need to use tools to help them get the correct answers.  It will be interesting to see how the students will do with story problems when they return from spring break!