Blog 7
This past week we worked with a few students to strengthen their understanding of teen numbers with the use of Digi-blocks. We found these were extremely helpful for kindergarteners to visualize the meaning of teens as a “group of ten and some more”. First we showed the box of 100 blocks to the student and asked him to count how many medium sized boxes were inside. The students responded with 10, and quickly opened one of the boxes to find there were also ten small blocks inside. The kindergartener then counted by tens to find there were 100 blocks total. We were then able to use this knowledge that there were 10 in each box to aid student in his understanding of teen numbers.
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Posted on February 11th, 2012 by stephaniekendzior09
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Blog 6
This week was very productive, and we collected several of our lesson ideas from the kindergarteners! In particular, we worked individually with a student who is developing his understanding of numbers 1-10 and his pronunciation of numbers in English. Although we have had some behavior problems with the student in the past, we were able to keep his attention for a solid half hour on Thursday! At first, we had the student practicing the numbers he knew by sorting through large pieces of paper with the numbers on them. We asked him to trace the number and place them in order 1-10. Although this has engaged him in the past, today he was not interested in completing the activity. The kindergartener also was feeling sick so needed a lot of tissues…It was comical because every time, the student would try to throw the Kleenex into the garbage can from his seat and surprisingly he had very good aim! Although we were impressed, his basketball practice was distracting from the lesson at hand.
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Posted on February 11th, 2012 by stephaniekendzior09
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Last week was an assessment week for the kindergartners. For this assessment they were given a written test where they were asked to circle the biggest number between two numbers, the smallest number between two numbers, fill in the missing number in a number line, write the numbers 1-20, complete a pattern, and read a bar graph. On Tuesday, I graded these tests and I was rather surprised by the results. Students who I had thought were in the higher ability group got really low scores and students who were in the lower group made some progression. It further emphasized the idea that one test can not tell a teacher everything about a student. After I looked over the grades of the tests I was curious to see if the test scores were accurate. I wondered if maybe I had thought some the students understood more than they really did. In order to figure this out, we began pulling some of the students who really struggled on the test. We planned to go over the same concepts that were on the test and see how they did. Sure enough, most of the students who did not score well on the test, but were typically in the higher ability group did better while working with us than on the test. For some students there was not much of a difference between the test and the work we did with him or her on Tuesday. This experience has really showed me the importance of various types of assessments. It helps when students are given other opportunities to show what they have learned other than just a written test, especially in kindergarten. Although the tests did not go as well as we would have hoped, they did give us a good idea of where to start next. The downside, however, is that with this week being our last week of the term we won’t be working with the students for 3 weeks. Once we get back the students only have a week left before their 2 week spring break. So we now face the challenge of trying to keep the students progressing at the same pace.
Posted on February 10th, 2012 by amandajohnson09
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During our teaching time, we decided to work with a bilingual student who has been struggling still with recognizing the numbers 1-6. While we were trying to work with him, we noticed that he did not like to sit still. He loved when we let him write the numbers on the white board, but that was about all we could get him to concentrate for. He spent some time rolling around on the floor and kept trying to throw kleenex and paper in the waste basket. When we noticed how much fun he was having throwing the paper in the waste basket, we quickly thought of a way we could incorporate numbers into this. We came up with a new game for him to play. While Ms. Kendzior was working and trying to get him to concentrate, i made a trip back to the classroom and got some extra paper and a dice. We already had a long, plastic chain link and the numbers 1-6 written out on whole sheets of paper. We spread the numbers out on the floor in random order, and put the chain in a line parallell to the numbers. This would be the line he could not go past when he was throwing the paper ball. The object of this “game” was to roll the dice, and throw the paper ball on the corresponding number. In order to do this, he needed to count the number of dots on the dice, and recognize the number. If he threw the ball the correct number, he gained a point. If he threw the ball to the incorrect number, he lost a point. We wanted to see how many points he had at the end. He LOVED this game! It really helped him to concentrate on the number. One thing that we could have done better was have him roll the dice, count the dots, and figured out which number paper he was going to throw the ball to before we gave him the paper ball. He got a little distracted with it and just wanted to throw the ball. It was a great way for the student to inspire a completely unique game designed directly for the individual student and it really helped him a lot!
Posted on February 9th, 2012 by michellehanson09
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After discussing some interesting students we have, and which one’s we want to do our case study on, we finally came to the conclusion that we would do it on a particular student that has puzzled us from the beginning. This student is not able to count past seven most of the time, but when we use the iPad and play the What’s hiding? app he is able to answer all of the questions correctly and quickly. His ability to do this is really amazing due to the fact that he is not very good at rote counting. The What’s Hiding? app on the iPad is an app that works with the ten frame model. This app first shows chips in a ten frame and then it covers the ten frame and takes some of these chips out. After the student has looked at the chips that are out of the ten frame they have to determine how many chips are left in the ten frame hiding. You would think this game would be quite difficult for a student who is not very good at counting, but this in fact is not true for this particular student. He is able to answer all of these questions very quickly and correctly. After playing this game with him a few times and asking him how he was able to know the answer, we were still a little bit confused on how he did it, but we think he knows the amount of chips that are still hiding by the pattern the ten frame makes. He knows that there are five chips on the top of the ten frame and five on the bottom. So, he remembers what the pattern looks like when he first looks at the ten frame, and then when they come out of the ten frame he looks at how the pattern has changed and see’s which ones are missing. I am not positive this is exactly what he is doing, but it seems like it so far. I think this is a very interesting case, and I can’t wait to study him and his thinking more in the next few weeks!
Posted on February 8th, 2012 by kathryncannova09
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On Tuesday, we worked on the iPads. We particularly were interested in trying to understand how the students think when they play different iPad games. One student really confuses me. He is a student who seems to be at a much lower ability than his peers. Although this student has a problem counting higher than ten and has a hard time recognizing his numbers, he can do more difficult problem solving types of math problems. For example, one of the apps we played with him was the What’s Hiding? app. This app uses basic subtraction to figure out how many chips are still hidden. This particular student gets almost every question right when he plays this game. On Tuesday, he told us that he uses the pattern of the chips to figure out how many are missing. After hearing this we wanted to see what would happen if we moved to other addition and subtraction problems. We switched apps and played the Number Line Math app. In this app, students are given an addition or subtraction. They have to select the correct answer from the numbers at the bottom of the screen, and above the problem is a number line to help them. Once again this student surprised us. He did not need to use the number line for assistance, instead he came up with his own method of tapping on the screen to figure out the correct answer. I am excited to keep working with this individual because it is so interesting the way he can think about addition and subtraction problems , but still can not count higher than 10.
Posted on February 3rd, 2012 by amandajohnson09
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Today, we were trying to work with lower ability students who were struggling to recognize numbers 7-10. We pulled out a group of three students; two of which were boys and one that was a girl. The two boys were not paying any attention to Ms. Kendzior and I. We warned them three times to sit down and pay attention to the numbers, but they could not focus. They were taking away the learning experience for the girl that was trying to learn the numbers. Finally, I told the students that their behavior was unacceptable and we were going to go back to the classroom. We did not move on with the lesson until these two students left. I pulled the two boys aside individually and had them self-assess their behavior. I asked them if they knew why they needed to go back to the classroom. Though both of the boys were not happy about having to go back to the classroom, they both replied that it was because there were not listening to their teachers. I also asked them if they thought that it was fair to distract the girl student who was trying really hard to learn. They said know. I asked them to show how their behavior was with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. They both put their thumbs down. I concluded with asking them how their behavior will be when we see them next week and they put their thumbs up. As they went back to the classroom, I told them that I wanted them to think about different things they will do next week to help improve their behavior. By half way through kindergarten, the students know what the proper behavior for the classroom is. They can point out where they started misbehaving and how they could make better decisions next time. If they still cannot control their behaviors and distract others, we will send them back to the classroom yet again. If the behavior still continues, it tells us that we will not be able to work in small groups with the particular child. We will need to work one on one with the student, which might not be as fun for the student, but it will give all students a better learning environment.
Posted on February 2nd, 2012 by michellehanson09
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This week we decided to focus on recognizing and creating teen numbers with our lower ability students. To work on the teen numbers we decided we were going to have the students explore with pipe cleaners and try and make the teen numbers themselves. This way we could see if they understood what the numbers looked like and what they were called.
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Posted on January 29th, 2012 by kathryncannova09
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As I said in my blog last week the focus this week was also on teen numbers. On Tuesday, I worked with the students with the ten frames again. They seemed to understand it a little better, but still could not fully grasp the concept. A few of them figured out that every time they made a teen number it required them to fill up one full ten frame then add so many ones. However, most of them still just counted out every marble until they created the number. Today, instead of using the ten frames again we went out and bought pipe cleaners. This turned out to be the best idea for trying to teach the kindergartners teen numbers. We gave each student a handful of pipe cleaners and asked them to create a number for us. We typically started with 4 or another single digit number. Once the students had made their 4, we would then say if we want to make 14 what other number do we need. At first the students didn’t know, but after going through a few numbers they realized the pattern. Every time they heard us ask for a teen number and heard the “teen” at the end of the word, they knew that meant they needed to put a 1 in the front of the number! It was so cool to see the huge smiles each of the students had on their faces once they figured out how to recognize and make teen numbers. I could almost see it in their faces that after all these weeks of working on teen numbers it all finally made sense. Now that the students are understanding their teen numbers it will be fun to see what other games and concepts we can move on to!
Posted on January 26th, 2012 by amandajohnson09
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We recently started addition with two of our kindergartners. When we started the lesson, we were not entirely sure how this lesson would go, but we were pleasantly surprised! It ended up going amazing! We started off using the iPad app called “Number Line.” This showed an addition problem and had a number line on top of it. We gave the two students two different colored square tiles to help them. We told one boy he was going to be the first number and the other would be the second number. They counted out their correct amount of tiles. Then, we asked the students what they thought the “+” symbol meant. They gave out a few answers, but then one boy said, “maybe you can mush them together.” We were very excited by this answer and gave the boys a lot of praise for figuring this out! The boys would then see that their 4 green tiles + their 3 blue tiles equaled 7 tiles all together. We then moved on the another iPad app called “Fetch Lunch Rush.” The students love this game because it is more of a competition. While one of the students was adding with the tiles and answering the addition problems, I had the other student and was teaching them to do addition on their fingers so they would not need tiles. I told them that we would be doing the same thing, but with fingers instead of tiles. I told the students that we will always start with the same number of fingers as the first number has. So for an equation of 2+5, we started with two fingers sticking up. Then, we counted to 5 and put a finger up every time we counted a number. When we put 5 more fingers up, we went back and counted how many fingers we had sticking up in total. This is how we got 7 fingers sticking up. I did this a few times modeling it for the student, but by the end, I would send them on their own and help them where it was needed until they could accurately do addition problems on their fingers. Overall, we had a very successful day teaching addition to the students and I can’t wait to help other students learn this fun and exciting skill.
Posted on January 25th, 2012 by michellehanson09
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