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.
December 3, 2019
A second-grader works on basic number combinations as we see him playing a comparison card game, Capture It. He is accurate when comparing sums but is still developing his efficiency and flexibility, key indications of fluency.
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 has limited use of structure and a partial understanding of cubic units. Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence…
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.