Last week during our face to face meeting, we decided to write about one student and identify where in the Number Sense trajectory he/she might be. The following is my description.
Nevaeh
I was in working with a small group on "Ways to Make a Number" (page 83). I asked the students to think of all the possible ways to make the number 14. I gave them white boards, markers, and two minutes. One child wrote a whole fact family that included 10, 4, and 14. Another student simply wrote '14' and Nevaeh's board was left blank. I realized that the students were in very different places. I dismissed the student who wrote the fact family so I could focus on the the students who seemed to be having the most trouble and I dove in with an example. I wrote, "10 + 4 = 14". I also drew a ten frame to support this number sentence. The little guys just seemed stuck and I noticed that each time we drew a picture, Nevaeh was counting every single dot one at a time. I decided to stop the routine because even with the scaffolded support of ten frames, Nevaeh was still having trouble. I decided to dismiss the other child and do some more probing with her to find out just where she might be in the Number Sense Trajectory (page 9).
I started by drawing a ten frame and filled it with 10 dots. I asked her to tell me how many. She correctly counted them one by one until she reached 10. I erased one and asked her to identify the new number and instead of simply counting back from 10 one time, she started counting one by one again. I kept probing until I found that she could correctly subitize numbers up to 6. Once I showed her a number larger than 6, she began counting one by one.
Discussion Questions:
Q1 - What type of subitizing was Nevaeh demonstrating?
Q2 - Thinking about the next step, what routine would you use with Neveah next?
