Weekly blog post

This students task this week was to work with fact families. The class has sort of been talking about this concept since the beginning of the year. This is the first time that students have seen the fact families being formatted like this. However, it still seems like half of the students have really caught onto this concept and the other half still need further help with this. The students who don't understand this concept usually did 7+3=10 but could not figure out what to do with it after that. This student seemed to understand the reciprocal of the addition problems, so 7+3=10 and 3+7=10. However, when it can to the addition portion of this problem the student originally had 3-7=10 and 7-3=10. I asked her if this made since. Could subtracting smaller numbers equal a larger one. After a few minutes of no response I drew out what she had written. She then told me that it 7-3 couldn't equal 10. So I walked her through the second part of this problem.

Questions

1. Is putting the fact families in this format more confusing for the student?
2. Does she understand that these problems are all the same or did she just memorize that 7+3=10 and 3+7=10?
3. Does she understand that subtraction are taking away which would give you a smaller number
4. Or did she just get confused and rushed through this problem to get done?


To figure out some of these answer I should have asked her a simple subtraction problem like what is 4-2 eaual. I'm thinking that if I could quiz her on a couple of simple math subtraction facts that then I could figure out if she understands subtraction. Again, I could do this same idea with addition. I mean I understand that addition facts are memorized, but my thought is that she is not grasping this concept but rather just plugging away at what she knows. Like previously stated I should have quizzed her and asked if she actually knew how to do this problem or if she wanted to rush through it so she could color.