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Coming Into The Math Activity Essay

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Coming into the math activity, I was expecting the activity to go smoothly. I figured the students would be able to solve multiplication problems easily and would need very little, if any help. I figured they would be able to follow instructions. That’s exactly what happened for the third graders, but for the younger ones we had to switch to addition instead of multiplication. Overall, it was a very pleasant activity and it taught me a lot about how children today are learning when it comes to mathematics. Kids Count threw us a big curveball when they told us we wouldn’t be getting only third graders because after all, our activity was designed for third graders. We decided to do addition for younger students instead. For one group, we had to implement that. For another group, we had all third graders and one second grader. She didn’t know multiplication so I had to explain to her that multiplication is adding up numbers. For a problem like 11x5, we added 11x5 times to get 55. I wanted her to write out the answer and work it out herself with the whiteboard but I realized I couldn’t do that- the third graders were getting antsy and were shouting out the answer when they knew they weren’t supposed to because they were tired of waiting. I knew then I had to I had to write it out while she did the math either in her head or on her finger and make it easy for her. I would say what’s 11+11, she’d say 21 and I would say add another 11 and so on until we got the appropriate
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