When less is more

Danette Goulet

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education

writer Danette Goulet visits a campus within the Newport-Mesa Unified

School District and writes about her experience.

Furrowing her brow, 6-year-old Karla Ruelas counted out eight little

fingers with tiny nails polished in pink.

“Take away seven,” she said as she began to fold her fingers back

down, one by one.

“One,” she concluded with a small nod and smile of satisfaction.

Karla and her classmates in Michelle Mueller’s first-grade class at

Adams Elementary School in Costa Mesa were practicing subtraction for an

upcoming test.

Around the room, there were three activity stations where children

each spent about 15 minutes. At each station, Mueller worked with

students, giving them various ways to visualize the math problems in

their heads -- a way to make subtraction easier.

I plopped down on the carpet and joined a group at their first

station, where they had work sheets and tubs of green plastic blocks with

numbers on them. The students used the blocks to fill in blank spaces in

number sentences. Some were missing the answer, others the first or

second number.

A couple of the sheets also dealt with counting by twos, fives and

10s.

The fun of it all clearly was digging around in the buckets of plastic

number blocks.

Next, I traveled with the group to station two. There, students were

given that coarse, horizontal paper with the fat lines and a dotted line

down the center.

The first-graders wrote their names and the date at the top. The

letters in young Alexandra Mazur’s name, I noticed, came to the perfect

place on the wide lines -- the “A” and the “M” reached the top line and

all the others letters just touched the dotted line in the middle.

At this station, students wrote a subtraction number sentence by

rolling a pair of dice.

The reason for this activity, Mueller said, is to help students learn

to put the larger number first, then subtract the smaller number from it.

It is a concept with which some children have difficulty, she said.

But when the first dice were rolled, 6-year-old Maurice Watkins knew

which number came first.

“And why are you going to put the eight first, Maurice?” Mueller

asked.

“Because it’s more bigger,” he replied, in a proud, matter-of-fact

voice.

At the final station, students used a mathematics computer program

that alternated between giving them math problems to answer and playing

Paddle Ball, a game that, I guess, worked on their coordination and motor

skills.

In Paddle Ball -- a version of Atari’s Breakout, the player controls a

ball that hits rows of alligators, fish and turtles.

Subtraction is a lot more fun than it used to be.

FYI

WHO: First-grade students in Michelle Mueller’s class

WHERE: Adams Elementary School, Costa Mesa

LESSON: Subtraction