math activities. Briana said that she compared numbers when she played the card
game. Kyle said he compared cube towers at Grab and Count.
A few days later, Kyle was playing with our phonics puppets. He approached
me with two of them and said, “Look, I compared Milo Mouse to Frederica Frog,
and Frederica Frog is bigger!” I was so pleased to hear him using the idea and the
language spontaneously in a new context. He shared his discovery at meeting and,
as a result, comparing the puppets became a choice at math time. Later, Kyle
measured some of the puppets with Unifix cubes and counted how many cubes
long each was. I was pleased that he was applying the counting piece, particularly
because he had avoided it at the start of our investigation.
Briana also showed that she was building an understanding of the math we
were working on. The students made stacks of Unifix cubes with 1 cube for each
letter in their names and then put letter stickers on the cubes to spell their names.
Many of the students spontaneously started talking about whose names were
longer and shorter, and they lined up 2 names to compare them. I wasn’t planning
to introduce any recording until another day, but Briana said, “We can use the pa-
pers from Grab and Count [the paper cube strips] and copy the names into the
squares and circle the bigger name.” I was so pleased that Briana had made sense
of the idea of comparing and had connected to the process of recording her math.
More Comparing
Our investigation of comparing ended with an activity called Comparing Inventory
Bags, a variation of a previous counting activity called Inventory Bags during which
students counted small collections of objects in paper bags and showed on paper
what was in the bag and how many (Russell et al. 2008a). When I told the class that
each pair of students would be given 2 inventory bags and I asked them to guess
what they were going to do, several children called out “Compare them!” They
knew what we were studying in math! I asked how they could compare the collec-
tions in their 2 bags, because they couldn’t stack them up and line them up next to
each other like Unifix cubes. They had lots of ideas. Off they went.
Again I kept careful track of my learners who struggle to see if they were able
to make connections from the previous work. Briana and her partner had a bag of
6 checkers and a bag of 9 dominoes. Briana drew all the checkers and all the
dominoes, making the first one detailed and the rest just a round or square shape.
She also wrote 6 next to the checkers and 9 next to the dominoes, and circled the
- When I asked her how she knew that 9 was more she said, “I drew 6 checkers,
and then I drew 6 dominoes, and I had to draw more dominoes then.” Not only
was she counting and recording, but her method of recording helped her reason
about the quantities and compare them.
MAKINGMATHEMATICSEXPLICIT