Jones- Week 8

Kallie Jones
Week 8- October 25

As I continue to look at Student Work, it is evident that there are students who want to be challenged more and there are students who struggle to understand grade level concepts. The Student Work that I chose to look at for this week was an a page that Students had to do in their Everyday Math Journal that had to deal with making Ballpark Estimates and then solving the actual problems and comparing their estimate to the actual answer. Students had 6 questions that dealt with this topic. After working with about 4 students to review the work that they completed, their was one student in particular who stood out to me. What the work revealed about this students current mathematical understanding was that this student was having some trouble with estimation. This student showed they he could round to the nearest hundred but not to the nearest 10. The question did not ask the student to round to the nearest ten, however had he rounded to the nearest 10, his ballpark answer would have been closer to the actual answer. The student did ask me why his answer was so far away from the actual answer and I explained to him that the he needed to round to the nearest 10 instead of the nearest hundred. by doing this, it would put his estimate more in the "ballpark" of the actual answer.  Based off of the discussion that I had with this student, two ways that I might advance this students understanding would be to review the concept of estimation with him and discuss the when it is appropriate to round to the nearest hundred or ten when he is not given specific directions. I would also have him solve a series of estimation problem and have him explain his reasoning on why he solved a particular problem the way that he did. Future tasks that this student may find fruitful may be using estimation across subjects. Instead of just seeing estimation in the context of math, using estimation in Science may help this student see how it can be used and how different estimations can yield different results. This could be connected to the ballpark estimation activity.