Samantha, who was matching her towers directly to the paper cubes and coloring
the cubes next to the real cubes. I said to Briana, “I like that you are counting your
cubes and comparing your stacks. Samantha has an idea for how to color the pa-
per cubes to show her stacks. It’s important that you show how tall your stacks are
and which has more cubes.” We held class conversations about how to color in
the cubes on the paper to show how many cubes were in the towers, and I demon-
strated on chart paper some of the strategies students had suggested or had used
at their tables. I was glad to see that Samantha was using a good strategy and
hoped that Briana might both think about our previous class conversations and
take note of what Samantha was doing.
Next, I worked with Latisha for a few minutes one-on-one. I had her grab
handfuls of cubes and count them up. She kept reaching for the markers and try-
ing to keep other students from taking her preferred colors until I finally moved
the markers and papers off the table. I said, “Latisha, I know you like to color, but
the most important thing for you to do right now is count. Counting is an im-
portant part of math. I want you to keep grabbing handfuls of cubes and counting
them up. Later you can color.” I planned the next day to have Latisha compare 2
stacks, and not to work on the recording piece until much later. I felt that the
most important math idea for Latisha was counting accurately and thinking about
quantity, so my bottom line message to her was “You must count.”
Playing Compare
The class chugged along for some days with this and other activities about com-
paring. Briana was partnered with a couple other students who had different
strategies for coloring their cube papers, and she usually ended up aligning her
cubes right next to the paper cube strips—the same strategy that Samantha had
used. Latisha sometimes fought over markers, but often counted her cube stacks,
and could do so accurately up to 7 or 8.
Next, we played the card game Compare (Russell et al. 2008a), which is ba-
sically the pacifist version of War, during which players each turn over a number
card and the one whose card has a greater number says “Me.” We also measured
objects by comparing them to a stick of 10 Unifix cubes, and we sorted the ob-
jects into groups of “longer than the cube stick” and “shorter than the cube stick.”
Throughout the lessons and activities, I was sure to use the word comparewhen
talking with the students. I wondered if they realized that all of the activities hung
together around the idea of comparing. I decided to ask them. At the end of math
time one day, I said, “Raise your hand if you did some comparing today.” Almost
all the students, including Briana and Kyle, raised their hands. Many kindergart-
ners talked about how they compared numbers or lengths during the different
You Can’t Build a Sand Castle on a Classmate’s Head