data and was able to share with her classmates what she had learned about their
favorite colors (see Figure 10–2). Observing her engagement and her relative
strengths in collecting, organizing, and interpreting data reminded me that I can-
not assume that students who are weak in one area are necessarily weak in all ar-
eas. It is important to be attuned to students’ strengths as well as their gaps.
Kristen also experienced success during the patterns and functions unit in
March. She was able to complete and extend tables that represented the rela-
tionship between the number of floors in a building and the number of rooms
(Russell et al. 2008e). Although the activity called for completing the table up to
10 floors, she was consistently successful when working up to a total of 5 floors.
The activity required her to make each floor of the building with cubes. The
cubes created a model for what was happening in the activity and provided a
structure for noticing and counting by equal groups. Throughout these activities,
Kristen sat with a partner to solidify her own understanding of how the number
relationships were represented in this table. Both students benefited from work-
ing with this abbreviated version of the table. To encourage some collaboration,
I asked both students to work together to build each floor and keep track of the
how the building was growing on their individual worksheets. After some redi-
rection, both students got used to the idea of taking turns adding floors, then
Assessing and Developing Early Number ConceptsFigure 10–2.