Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking. They are not teaching episodes or formal assessments.
October 29, 2019
Children love to count. Counting helps them make sense of the world and to find out how many of something. With time and practice, children develop an understanding of the “rules” or principles of counting.
Regardless of how high a preschooler can rote count, a child’s sense of what those numbers actually mean develops gradually. We call this understanding number sense, and it requires relating numbers to real quantities.
This child successfully attempts to match geo-solids using triangular prism-shaped blocks. Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking.…
A child counts an organized collection of bears. Children often sort collections into groups by color. Here, a preschooler assumes he has equal groups until he counts them.
A second grader has a partial understanding of counting in equal groups, but is still working on rational counting. Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are…
This second grader uses a known number combination (3 + 9) to solve a subtraction problem, showing an understanding of how addition and subtraction are related as inverse operations.
A child is pushed to decipher the repeating pattern in an array of blocks. Then he attempts to continue the pattern.
This second grader demonstrates an interesting choice for a mathematical model by graphing.
A student explains how his classroom's attendance chart is used.
A student counts backwards and forwards on a number line with hidden digits.