The 2 Essay, Research Paper

Melissa Minnich

November 13, 2000

ELED 361

Reflection on Morning of Math

A.)

The first group of students consisted of k-2nd graders. There were a lot of children who came to our activity. Since our activity was involving shopping, most of the kids grabbed everything to buy. The majority of them just wanted to play with the cash register. For the younger students I used lesser amounts of money due to their age and what they know. Mostly everything was priced fewer than five cents. This made it easier for them. But things really didn t go as planned with the younger children. As they went through and pretended to buy the items out on the table, they picked up everything in sight, which left nothing for the other children to buy. And the child who was the cashier just wanted to play around with it, instead of calculating the customer s groceries. Another problem I ran into dealt with counting the money. I had to help them count the money, because they didn t know how to count the money that well. This activity is more geared towards the older children. The younger kids had a lot of trouble with the counting the money and understanding the addition and subtracting of the total cost. Next time I will make a limit on how much they can buy, and I will make everything under 5 cents so that they will be able to calculate the money easier.

B.)

The second group of students consisted of third and fourth graders. The activity went really well with the older students. There was an exception of a few students whom had some trouble counting up the money, but I helped them count and give change back. With the older students, I re-priced everything to at least a quarter. The highest price of an item was 75 cents. And the smallest price of an item was a nickel. Once again, there were a lot of students that wanted to play around with the cash register, but they understood the concept better then the younger kids. I also should have made a limit of how many items they were allowed to buy, at the very end, the made a new rule that they could only pick out at most 10 items, because there were a lot of students who wanted to come to our table. I found it hard to control all of the students, because our activity can only be for at most three people, and at times there was at least 4 people at our table. Overall, the activity went really well, and the only change I would make next time I do this activity is to make a limit on how many items they will be allowed to purchase.