Student Work Blog

This week in math we've been working on skip counting (2nd grade). We're working on counting by 1s, 5s, and 10s and following the sequence of numbers given. Many students have a solid understanding of this concept while other students are consistently struggling. The student work that I analyzed was a student who does well with mat, but still appears to have some gaps in his understanding of the subject . In one of the problems I analyzed, the question asked students to start with the number 10 and skip by 5s, so the sequence should have looked like 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. Instead this student wrote 10, 15, 16, 17, 18. This shows that his counting abilities are good, however the student did not finish the sequence correctly. He wrote 15, but then continued counting by 1s. It seems like he didn't understand that he had to continue counting by 5s. A way I could advance this student's understanding is to remind them to read the directions carefully. I would ask them to tell me how they count by 5s to see if the problem lies there. If the student can recite it correctly then it might be an issue of putting it to paper (especially when the problem asks the student to start at a number other than zero) I think this can cause a lot of confusion. I would like to offer students manipulatives to use or have them come up with their own number sequences in the future.