Bode Week 11

           I do not have a picture of the student work because it was the written assessment for my math unit and my teacher needed the tests to plug in the grades for the students report cards. On this piece of work, the assessment, the student answered that 2 nickels and 3 pennies was 25 cents and on the second questions she answered that 1 nickel and 5 pennies was 30 cents. When it asked her to circle the largest amount of coins shown she circled the 25 cent answer.

            This student work piece shows me that this student is not recognizing the difference in coin amount when counting combinations of coins. She sees 5 coins as nickels rather than 2 nickels and 3 pennies. She counted the 5 coins by 5s and that’s why she answered 25, this is the same reasoning for the next question. She answered that 6 coins shown made 30 rather than seeing that there was 1 nickel and 5 pennies. She doesn’t understand the counting combinations of nickels and pennies, instead she’s only counting like they were all nickels. As for the second part of the question that asked her to circle the largest amount I do not know the thinking behind this answer. What I believe may have happened was that she looked at another students paper and saw that that space on the test was circled and so she circled hers as well without looking at the amounts and working it out on her own. There are gaps in her learning as far as realizing the difference between counting nickels and pennies when they are in a combination and also understanding the coin amount that is more. It concerned me to see these answers she gave because we did much practice in my unit with counting coin combinations.

            In order to advance her thinking I have at least one solution I know will help this student visualize. I would not want to just tell this student that a nickel is larger than a penny because then when they learn dimes they will be very confused. Instead I want to help her identify the coins with the use of our class coin chart. Helping her see and asking her to identify coin faces will help her to be able to distinguish the faces and values faster on the test or any coin combination problem she’s given. Another solution to advancing her thinking is having her practice writing the coin values above the coin itself so that she can count what she wrote down instead of trying to remember if she identified the coin as a nickel or penny. I’ve seen students do this where they write the value above the coins and it has helped them count the combination every time. This could be an excellent trick for someone like this student who has a hard time distinguishing the coin values and then counting all the coins together.