Math with whiteboards

Today I was able to observe math instruction in the classroom. Now, I have seen my CE do math in class before but this was a little different today. Monday she had the student's take a math test. If the student's made a 4 or 3 they passed. Most of the students did well but all of them seemed to have problems with the backside of the test, so my CE modified her math instruction to reinforce what was on the back of the math test.

The students were having trouble with do vertical two digit math problems. My CE gave each student a whiteboard and a marker to do the learning experience. The CE wrote out math problems on the page enough for each student to participate in solving one. The students will work along with the student that was at the board solving the problem. This class has a few short songs to help with addition such as "always always do the ones and then the tens" and " when you make a ten the 0 goes down and the 1 goes up in the tens place" From this learning experience I was able to gauge which students seemed to be struggling and what they were struggling with.

One of the students' had a problem with the regrouping and totally forgot about the ten that she had added to the tens place, which of course made the answer ten short. By guidance from the other students and the CE, she was able to see what she did wrong. The students were really struggling to do the math problems vertically. The students wanted to solve the math problems horizontally which was greatly confusing them since they were regrouping with the tens. For solving math problems vertically my CE has a specific way that she wants the students to solve them.  First they are to to draw an Capital I, write the problem within the I, label the ones and tens place and then solve the problem. I noticed that some of the students did not need these steps to solve the problems whereas others were struggling just to label the place value for each side.