Ricchio Week 13

The student work I examined for this week's blog was a homework assignment my students completed. The homework is on "Change Number Stories" where students use a change diagram to represent problems in which a starting quantity is increased or decreased. The question gave a number story that asked, "Becky ate 11 grapes. Later in the day she ate 7 more grapes. How many grapes did she eat in all?" The student I examined said the total was 4 grapes and wrote 11+7=4 as her number model. She was the only one with this answer and I found it interesting since she answered the other number stories correctly. What I think this student was doing was she used the numbers given (7 and 11) and found the difference giving her the answer 4. What interested me most was that she wrote her number model as 11+7=4.

One way to advance this student’s thinking is to ask her again if 11+7=4 and see if her response is the same. A future math task I could give her is to count backwards and find the solution to a problem where she actually needs to find the difference. Then I would have her do a problem with finding how many there are of something all together by adding. This will help this student pay attention to the wording of problems and understand when to use addition or subtraction.