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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Face palm, times ten

Today I was working with one of my students who acts a lot dumber than I really think he is.  We were going over the concept of addition with regrouping.  He had drawn a picture which showed 7 ones and 6 ones being added in the ones column.  He had moved all 13 ones down to the ones' answer spot.

I told him that there were too many ones to go there and that we needed to regroup.  So I asked him how many ones we needed to put together to make a ten.

His reply:  Five?

I said, "Think about the name of the place value.  It's the TENS place.  How many ones do we need to make a TEN?"

With more certainty this time, he answered, "Three."

I finally went and grabbed the base-ten blocks, which we had worked extensively with yesterday, to show him that three ones actually did not make a TEN.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Is it really 4th grade this year? Even for 3rd thats unbelievable!!!

Teacher gardener said...

I've got this goin' on in 6th! grade. I do not have the patience for this. I asked him, "How far do you think this behavior is going to get you?" Naturally, he acts like he doesn't know what I'm talking about, but the smirk on his face says he does.