What does it make when we assume?

MONDAY:

I had a pretty valuable lesson reinforced today. Never assume what the students know and do not know.

During ELT we did a couple of place value activities, and I figured this would just be review for everyone and we would be able to move onto the next number sense topic. I have the feeling my mentor teacher and the support team teacher who was in the room at that time had the same feeling as well. Turns out I was wrong. We played a game with two teams, 10 on each team. Each student had a large number, any digit 0-9. When the teacher called out a number, 342,891 for example, the teams had to order themselves to make that number. In short, mistakes were made by the children when lining up. Even the ones who seem to have a pretty good grasp on everything dealing with place value didn’t seem confident enough to help their team correct mistakes in their order. The biggest problem seemed to be putting a 0 where it shouldn’t be or leaving one out to fill an empty place value.

After the game was over, we went over a couple of examples similar to the ones they were having trouble with in the game. After an explanation, it seemed to either click with, or come back to, some of the students. Still, after doing a group activity today there were a few students getting a little mixed up when including, or not including, a zero.