Modeling - Easy Addition
Trixie was 2 years and 8 months at the time that this video was made.
The Problem
Trixie is playing with her xylophone, counting something on my T-shirt,
when I see
an opportunity to introduce an Easy Addition problem. "I have 5 fish
over here, and
5 fish over here. What I want to know is how many fish I have
altogether."
What To Look For In This Video
- Trixie loves to change the numbers in the problems that I give her. There is no harm in that unless the change makes the problem either too easy or too hard.
- I think that Trixie has a sense that she doesn't know how to answer questions of the form, "how many altogether?" In other words, I think that she knows that she doesn't know what those questions mean. Hence, her clever first answer, "a lot."
- Trixie tries 2 different real answers to to my question - both of these are perfectly typical:
- "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . 1, 2, 3, 4, 5" (counting the fingers on each hand separately)
- "1, 2" (i.e. the number of hands I am holding up)
- It seems clear that Trixie does not understand the question. She is not going to figure it out on her own. I believe that it makes sense to explicitly tell her what to do.
- Notice that when I count to 10 with her, she pauses when we get to 6. I think that she is unsure about whether or not to start counting at 1 again.