Jordan knocked me out by doing this math homework almost all independently. The thing with "6-11=-5" was especially amazing to me. He is supposed to make math sentences out of 6, 5, and 11, and after knocking out the easy ones on the addition, he went with negative numbers on the subtraction. Okay, "5-6=-1" does not strictly follow the rules, but who cares? He needed a little help figuring out what 6-11 was.
Rachel: Okay, if we start with six, (holding up six fingers)
Jordan: Then we take away one at a time up to eleven. One, two, three, four, five, six (Rachel folding down fingers)
Rachel (reaching zero, all fingers folded): What do I do now?
Jordan: Start putting them up again. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. (Rachel has five fingers up. Jordan counts) Five!! Is it negative five?!
Rachel: Totally. You got it.
I was quite impressed. Now I'm thinking about the difference between hand-counting like that, and a number line, which is the classic way to approach negative numbers. I wonder about the possible advantages of doing it on your body vs. on a graphical representation, and also I wonder about the conceptual difference between numbers-of-fingers and position along a line. Really interesting.
Reading is still slow and I think frustrating for him; he'd much rather be read to, or guess. Writing, he seems to enjoy. Asked to "write a story to tell about the fish" (bottom right), he said (and I'm translating his spelling): "2 flatfish 5 sockeyes met by the stream and played. The end."
1 comment:
wow that's impressive that jordan's making sense of negative numbers! I think I would have gone for the the toes. I wonder how he knew to start putting fingers back up...
...it made me think of other ways you could count 6-11 with fingers. one way to do it would be by counting knuckles (three on each finger) with right hand positive and left hand negative (zero is naturally in between your hands, were there ain't anything to count!)
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