Blog of Student Work-Montague

The image above is from Karen’s kindergarten class in which (to my understanding) the children were working on one-to-one correspondence and the children were asked to draw a picture that had 5 items. Ways that I anticipate children to solve this is counting one, drawing one thing and so on (like the task was intending children to do). Another way that I anticipate children to solve this would be an incorrect way in which I see several children in my own class do. They count 1-5 out loud while they are making a dot on the paper but are not keeping in mind the one-to-one correspondence. It looks to me like this student started drawing hearts and may have started counting but lost track of that one-to-one correspondence at some point within his/her counting. However, when they finished, they realized that they had too many and went back and counted using one-to-one correspondence, therefore determining that they drew too many hearts. To me, that is why he/she went back and crossed off the hearts. There could be other reasons, maybe the student didn’t notice themselves that this happened. I wasn’t there so I am not sure, maybe the teacher brought it to their attention and told them they had 3 too many. I am not sure what else to say to this child to have them use a better strategy than to reinforce the importance of pointing to one item at a time to “assign” it a number (so to speak)—one-to-one correspondence. I know that this is only kindergarten so a lot of children this age struggle with this and it is something that they need lots of practice with, eventually I’m sure they will get it! On the basis of this child’s understanding, I would give them more practice with this with bigger numbers. It looks like they understood the concept, maybe they know how to draw 5 items. Maybe they would need more support with a bigger number? If they have the one to one correspondence completely down, I may suggest doing a simple story problem. Then again, I am not sure because I do not know what is too much for kindergarten yet. A simple story problem could be, there are 5 frogs on the log, 2 frogs hopped away to the pond, How many are left? I would include a picture and have them see if they know to cross off two of the frogs to get their answer. This could also be done with addition.