Week 10 Andrea Delise

For this week's student work, I want to talk about the class discussions that have been going on during math. When I ask the students "why" or "how do you know?" they love being able to explain something to me, instead of vice versa. The responses I get have been showing me exactly what the students are thinking and what they know. For example, I asked the students, "If I paid for an apple that was 7 cents with one dime, how much change do I get back?" One student said three pennies because, "I know that a dime is ten cents and ten minus 7 is 3, and one penny is one cent, so three pennies is three cents." This tells me that he understands the values of the coins, and that he uses subtraction to make change. I also see students counting up with their fingers, or making "hops" on their number grid. This lets me know how students are thinking and what they use to come to the answer. Today during my elapsed time activity, students were working collaboratively on an activity. They choose an activity card with various activities that either my students ALWAYS talk about, or are interested in, such as Obama's house and how ALL of them have met him. So, I made that an activity. Anyways, they roll a dice that tells them a time (3:00, 6:00, etc.) Then, they roll a dice with an elapsed time ( 45 minutes, an hour, etc.) They are to write these on a recording sheet, and find out the end time. Students were really into in and when I went around to the tables, I had them tell me how they knew. I found it interesting that students weren't just counting up on their clocks, or counting by fives. For example, the start time was 4:00 and the elapsed time was 2 hours 30 minutes. One student said, "Four plus two equals 6, plus 30 minutes, 6:30." This lets me know that this students knows that you are adding two hours and 30 extra minutes. Overall, asking students how and why are super important, and have really been giving me a good insight to what they know and what they need to continue to work on!