Katelyn McCormick Student Work Week 6

The student work samples that I collected this week were homework assignments completed in the form of Math Boxes. I focused on the tally marks box where students were given a number and asked to record the amount of tally marks to match the number. One particular student completed her tally marks each day in the same way. Instead of bundling tally marks with the 5th tally mark crossing diagonal, she made bundles of four so that three tally marks were vertical and the 4th one crossed diagonally. She still added her tallies up to the match the correct number. For the number 16, she did four bundles with four tallies in each bundle, so that it still added up to 16.

At this time, the student understands how to make individual tally marks and how to make appropriate amounts of tally marks based on a given number. There is a gap in her thinking about when to bundle the tallies. She does not yet understand that making bundles of 5 makes it easy to skip count by 5s to find the total.

I could advance this students thinking by pushing her to make tallies for a larger number such as, 50. This way the student would see that she was making more bundles than she needed to. I would also make tally marks using bundles of 5 to add up to 50. I would model skip counting the bundles so that she could see why I made bundles of 5. If I could ask her a question about her work, I would ask her if she possibly thought it was easier to make bundles of 4 or if she was just confused about where to bundle. A future math task for this student would be to have her analyze class tally charts to find out how many students have a dog as a pet (we completed a class pet tally chart). Since the number of tallies for dogs is more than 5, the student would see the bundle of 5 on the chart. I would ask the student to skip count to her answer. She might say, "5, 10, 11, 12, 13". In this way she would recognize that the bundles of 5 and the skip counting by  have a connection.