Student Work Week 7

This past week, I worked with one student, Dave, individually. This students has struggled with reading and writing and gets frustrated when he doesn't know how to spell words, so he often gives up. During math time, this student seems confident and thrives on getting the answers correct in class, however, he cannot read the directions, so he becomes even more frustrated when the problems aren't verbally said to him to solve. This week, the students were filling out their math boxes in their math journal. While walking around the room, I realized many, if not all, of the students had the first problem in the math box incorrect. The problem said, "Count by 6s." It looks like this: _,12,_24,_,_. We haven't taught counting by 6s, and have only been working on counting by fives and tens so far this year. When the students add, they normally use their fingers. I helped the students who had this math box incorrect, and showed them that we were counting by sixes, since many of them had 11, 12, 24, 25, 26 on their papers. When I got to Dave, I was completely shocked! He had the entire problem filled out correctly. I found this amazing because I know that Dave could not read "count." I asked him how he did the problem and he told me that he saw "6s" and so he went down 6 from 12 and up 6 from 12. He also told me that he realized that there was 12 from 12 to 24 so the middle number had to be 18. This justification was so great! Instead of giving up and saying that he couldn't read the problem, he used the clues in the directions, and in the problem itself to work out the problem. When explaining what he did for his problem to me, he stated HOW he solved the problem, and that he was able to realize the relationship between the 12 and 24, and had to find the middle number, 18, when he realized that he is supposed to be counting by sixes. He didn't just say, "I saw 6s, so I counted on my fingers until I got to the number." This is ultimately the goal of all my students! I want them to be able to tell me why and how, and not that they just arrived at the number by counting on their fingers. I would want my students to see the patterns and relationships between numbers, in order to solve the problems.