November Think Sheet 

What are you thinking about right now for your area of inquiry? 

I want to focus my inquiry on how Kindergartners develop number sense.  I want them to be able to see a number 1-30 and explain through pictures or words or number sentences what that number means beyond the concrete understanding that 5 is just 5 things or 5 is a written number.

Right now we are working on understanding ways to make numbers through 10.  eventually I want my students to be able to show a number in several ways, grouping by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.  

What is one thing you learned when you had a conversation with your focal student(s)?

That all of my focal students know what 5 is and have one to one correspondence when counting objects to 10.  They know that the number 5 means there are 5 objects.  

During the second interview, after several lessons and warm-ups around ways to make a number, one of focal students was able to say “3 and 3” makes six.  

I would like all of my students to head this direction where they are not only seeing the number as that number of something, but beginning to see it in different ways and grouping and communicate that with aromaticity.

Did you find out what you were hoping to find out in the conversation?

Yes and no.  I feel that some students have more academic language/vocabulary to describe their thinking.  Whereas with my EL student, it was more challenging for him and he didn’t seem to understand my question.  When asked what the number 5 was, Ivan said, “It’s just 5.”  When I asked him what that meant or made him think of, he said, “I don’t know.” Whereas he was able to show more on his index card assessment.

4 What do you want to know now?

How to transfer what they are thinking now to breaking apart 10’s and 1’s.  If they are beginning to see 6 as “3 and 3” or “1 and 5,” how will that transfer to numbers above 10 which we are now exploring more explicitly.  For example...16 is a 10 and 6 ones or 2 groups of 8.  

Where are you now in thinking about a repeating or routine data source?

I am going to continue to do routine warm ups with a target number each week.  At the end of the week, I will give them the quick index card assessment to see how they are thinking about that number.  I think it will be interesting to see what happens as the numbers get larger and I begin to use the language of place value.

What do you want help with today from your small group?

How to make my question more focused.

After group conversation:

What are you thinking now? What are your next steps for your inquiry?

It seems like finding a really clear question is a challenge for all of us because we have so many questions and it’s easy to try and tackle too much