Courtney Boettger

MIAA 350
Dr. Parker
Spring 2014

Notebook Assignment #1
Primary - Counting Strategies

After our first class together, I began thinking about the holes that my
current 5
th
graders have within their own math skills. Over the year, I have noticed
that many of my kids lack many of the math short cuts (what I like to call them)
that help make solving problems easier. These directly relate to number sense and
numeration. For example, when asking students to add 5 + 6, they were not quickly
able to produce the answer. A few of my students used the technique of counting on
while others used their fingers. I was shocked at how few did not make a double,
plus 1.
After my discovery, I decided to investigate with a few of our primary
teachers and take a look at the curriculum. As a student myself, I do not remember
ever being directly taught these different counting strategies, but I remember
discovering ones on my own that made sense to me. Over many years of being a
mathematician, I would use these strategies more times than I was even aware of.
As an educator now, never having taught primary, I became curious as to how
something as basic as counting/adding is taught in the classroom.
I started with the teachers. Many of them said that they do explicitly teach
the strategies. Much of this comes from the math curriculum, EnVision. I started to
look around in the book and the counting strategies each have their own lesson,
everything from counting on to sums of 10. What I found interesting is that each
strategy was a lesson itself, never tying the strategies together or allowing the
students to use the one they feel most confortable with.
This is where I think our system is flawed in the primary grades. The
curriculum teaches the strategies as a must know, instead of allowing the students
to use the strategy that makes the most logic sense to them. The tests include
questions where students must be able to apply the specific strategy. Due to this
demand and lack of understanding, I feel that our students are never really
discovering the strategy that works best for them. I know that if a subtract test,
require me to us the counting up strategy, I would have a hard time since I prefer to
use the counting down to subtrahend strategy.
I think as teachers, we need to be teaching these strategies as tools, no as test
question types. Students need to understand their own thinking of numbers before
they can go and use the others. If students do not develop strong number sense in
the younger ages, they will continue to struggle through their math career.