Lewis work blog week 14

The past couple days we have been working on developing patterns and predicting where the pattern will be in the xth stage.  My mentor teacher and I will present the first three sequences of a pattern, ask the students to recognize the rule, then apply that rule in order to find out the a specific part of the pattern further down the line. In one problem, the students were presented with the following problem. 

This problem was taken from the quick check the students were given at the end of class.  This problem is simpler than predicting a pattern far past the next unit of the pattern because it is simply asking how many blocks will be in the next tower.  One of my students had the misconception that the next tower would have four blocks in the fourth row.  From what I can tell, she is confusing the number of the column with the number of blocks in each column.  When I reviewed this problem with the student I asked her to draw out each part so she could see the addition of two more blocks to the second row each time.  This helped her to recognize the pattern. She then counted up the total number of blocks with the fourth row added and arrived at the answer of 20 total blocks in all.