Delise Student Work

To get the students to start thinking about coin combinations, the day before my unit began, I created a homework assignment for the students. The first part of the homework was asking to add up the coin values for a total. All of the students answered this correctly. Some students circled the coins, so I?m curious if this was a method for them: counting the coins and circling them once you?ve counted them. The next section asked, ?What different ways can you make a quarter, dime and nickel?? I wrote an example: Q= D D P P P P P. For this, some students used the bigger valued coins first, and then went to the pennies. Others started with pennies. For example, Xavier wrote D= P P P P P N. He may have counted to five with the pennies, and then realized instead of writing five more pennies, he could substitute it for a nickel. The next part of the math homework was for the students to show 3 ways to make 35 cents, 52 cents, and 76 cents. I wrote an example for the first one on this part as well. The students all did a great job on this part, and correctly showed three ways to make the totals. I found it interesting that some students started with the biggest coin value for these, and ended with the smaller coin values, and some students did the opposite. For example, Angela wrote 52 cents: QDNDPP. She went from 25, 35, 40 and then stopped and might have realized that she can go from 40 to 50 quickly with a dime, so she added another dime, followed by two pennies. She did the same thing on her third way to show 52 cents. She wrote: QNNNDPP. She counted 25, 30, 35, 40 and then stopped and did the same thing she did for the second way by adding a dime, followed by two pennies. I am wondering if she feels comfortable adding a dime to an even number, 40, as opposed to an odd number, 35.