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Erin Goulart Assessment #3

Morning work assessment: Place Value

Every morning the students have morning work assignments that are both assessed and used as examples of work to see where the student’s capabilities and difficulties lay. This particular morning, the students had one section of morning work that was testing their mathematics skills. In one particular spot I noticed that many of the students were either getting wrong from my observations, or asking for help. The problem gave the students two numbers, and asked them to find two different place values in either one and write the corresponding number on the line. Every time I went over to help the students, each one was having issues with individual places and their worth. For instance a lot of the students were mixing up the thousands place and the millions place. Many of them were swapping the two numbers. Many of the students were also confusing the actual number in the place value, as the title. For instance, from talking with the students, they would often say that in the number 1,223,998, which the place value’s title was the “three thousands place” for the number 3. I discussed this with the teacher, because knowing that this piece of morning work was going to be assessed, I wanted to make sure he understood that the concept of place values was not understood very well in the first place. He then proceeded to ask me, if he were to teach the lesson over again, what he would do. I thought that individually, and visually breaking up place values on a long number, and labeling them on the board would be helpful to the students. I also thought that individual number cards would help them to practice with testing their knowledge of values. I find that morning work assessment is difficult to count on. I think it’s a great way to track students progress, however, the same type of problems every morning, will discourage the students if they don’t understand or have any type of grasp on the particular lesson. The cooperating teacher ending up having to do a refresher lesson on place values that week, and the week I came back the improvement in their knowledge was incredible.