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
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