Third Lesson- March 27, 2008

Today was another good day in the classroom. Today we decided to introduce regrouping in addition to them and see how they could handle this one. Additionally, we decided that we wanted them to explore different strategies and really get a feel for who is comfortable doing what. We decided to review place value with them one more time and to represent the number 17 in different ways so that there wouldn't be any confusion when it came time to discussing regrouping. We showed the numeral 17 and they were able to tell us that the 1 was in the tens place and 7 was in the ones place. From there, we showed them the numeral with manipulatives and showed them that when you have more than ten ones, you could take them out of the ones column and trade them in for a tens rod. Some of them caught on immediately while others were still a little confused. We decided to continue with more examples using the manipulatives because we knew that most of them strongly benefited from visuals so we kept the base blocks out for the entire lesson. From here we introduced them to an addition problem involving regrouping. We went through the entire problem with them so they would be able to see the process that you should take when you want to regroup. We had them show the first addend using their manipulatives. We then had them represent the second addend with manipulatives making sure that they understand that when we add, we put things together so they wouldn't want to get rid of the first number they represented. We then had them push the two sets together so they would see that adding is combining two numbers. Once they had both numbers represented and then pushed together, we asked them to count the amount of ones represented. When they realized that in our problem, there was 13 in the ones place, we asked them if it was alright to write the number 13 in the ones place, then add whats in the tens place and get a number in the hundreds place. They knew this was wrong but some of them couldn't initially come up with how we could rectify our errors. From here we showed them how ten individual ones make up a tens rod and they realized that we could "trade them in". While the students were using the manipulatives they began to understand. Some of the time, it would get a bit frustrating because some of them would understand one problem, but when you give them another one, it was like they had forgot everything they said 2 seconds ago. We continued to do more examples with the manipulatives to get them to practice as much as possible. At the end of the lesson it seemed like they understood the concept but definitely still needed more practice.