Student Work Blog #8

This task had students practice building teen numbers. There were individual cubes to cut out as well as cubes in sets of 10 to cut out. Students traced the number, then showed the number using the 10’s and 1’s cubes, and then showed in a 10’s frame. This task is designed to elicit student thinking because it has students represent the same number in different ways. However, there are some questions I had about this task when watching students work and talking with them.

1.     Do the students really understand the place values? Many students struggled with how to do this worksheet, and asked for help (from teachers and other students). Using the number 12 for example, students said that there were “more of these (pointing to the 1’s) than these (pointing to the 10’s)”. While there were technically more pieces of paper cut out for the 1’s, there are 10 on the one piece of paper and only 2 one’s. One student thought that you needed one of the “big pieces” (10) and two of the “small pieces” (1’s) because the number was “1 and 2” (12).

2.     Do students really understand that one 10’s frame represents 10? Most of the students don’t seem to realize that a 10’s frame always has 10 in it. Very few students realized that for one frame, they could say 10, and then continue counting from there.

3.     What type of instruction about teen numbers was given prior to this worksheet? I know students have worked with 10’s frames before (but believe they still don’t understand exactly what it represents), but I wonder what type of activities they have done using the cubes in sets of 10. While I have seen the class using them on the SMART board once or twice, it is usually the teacher or one student working on it, and the rest of the class is probably not paying much attention (and not getting to personally practice).

To find the answers to these questions, I could ask students different questions about place values. Before giving them this task, I would ask them what the stack of cubes represents (10). I would go through the numbers with the students to make sure they knew what they were first. For example, when I mentioned how a student thought 12 was 1 and 2, I would go through the numbers and ask questions such as, “is this number bigger or smaller than 10”? For the 10’s frames, I could ask students how to solve a really large number, for example 73, and see if they knew to skip count by 10’s, knowing that they would need 7 full 10’s frames, and 3 more outside of the frame. To solve the last question, I could ask the teacher what other work students have done with teens, 10’s frames, and cubes stacked to represent 10. I could observe the work (if any) to see if students seem to be having a hard time with just this, or with other, previous work as well.