This week I had the opportunity to work with the students in Mrs. Carmack’s room and gather data related to counting on. The schedule this week was adjusted a bit, and I was not able to work with all of the students in my group, but of the students I was able to work with I saw the students fitting into groups similar to the ones I had seen in Mrs. Peterson’s class.
One of the goals of finding out if students can count on, is seeing if different situations seem to encourage counting on. In Mrs. Carmack’s class this week one student, E, demonstrated the strategy of counting on in multiple situations where the first addend was 10. For all of the problems, the sum was greater than 10 to discourage the use of counting all on fingers, but when the addend was anything other than 10, E did not use counting on.
One other student I observed, T, attempted to utilize counting on after it had been modeled on the Number Line app. When she did so, however, she would place her finger on the first addend on the number line, but then would count up the number of the first addend instead of the second. I wonder if reinforcing the fact that we start at the first addend because we already know that we have that many without needing to count, will help T to understand the strategy of counting on.
All of these findings will be interesting to take a closer look at now that I have started to identify students who are counting on.
Posted on April 13th, 2014 by Jessica Bacon
Filed under: Uncategorized