Math Reflection

When Mandy and I first began our math activity, she was excited and energetic to participate. Initially, I did not want to overwhelm her, so I started with three different worksheet activities to assess Mandy’s mathematical knowledge of numbers. I recognize, as an educator, we have a responsibility to assess our students’ mathematical abilities to better understand each student’s need. Indeed, I believe it is important to identify what each student knows and work from there. Thus, because I had no prior knowledge about Mandy’s counting and adding abilities, I began by assessing her mathematical skills of number recognition and counting in order. First, I asked Mandy to count orally for me from 1 to 100—which she did with no problems. Next, I asked her to write down the numbers from 1-10 in order on a worksheet (see page 1 of assessment). I found that Mandy was able to count and write the numbers correctly (yet, some numbers were written backwards). The third assessment asked Mandy to count the number of objects and write the correct number below (see page 1 of assessment). Yet, for this assessment I mixed the order of the quantities in order to determine if Mandy had one-on-one

To do this, I created assessment problems that required Mandy to know number combinations when solving addition equations. I prepared a worksheet with seven equations that were mixed in the way they were written. For example, some problems had either a missing number in the first number slot or in the second with the sum visible. Mandy was responsible to solve the problem by using the two mathematical numbers found in the equation. This part of the assessment started by introducing Mandy to the following equation: 3+__=7 (see page 2 of assessment). Lucy was able to solve the problem and as a result I proceeded to give her the worksheet with an additional seven equation problems (see page 3 of