some success so she could build her confidence. When a child has so many gaps, like
Kristen, it can be challenging to find activities that build success.
Further Accommodations
Knowing that she had been successful with some of the activities I provided her us-
ing small numbers, I began to provide Kristen with some first-grade counting activi-
ties from Investigations in Number, Data, and Space. One activity, called Start
With/Get To (Russell et al. 2008f), involves marking the number 1 on a number line
as a “Start With” number, then choosing a card with a “Get To” number. The stu-
dent counts the distance between the two. I also provided opportunities for Kristen
to play Compare, in which two players each turn over a card (Russell et al. 2008f).
The student with the highest number wins. Kristen was successful with both games,
including a variation of Compare in which two cards are turned over and combined.
At the same time, I continued to modify the activities that the rest of my stu-
dents were working on, and to work to identify places where meaning broke down
for Kristen. We had begun a series of activities designed to develop an under-
standing of place value, and students had been solving the following problem:
Sally has 3 towers of 10 cubes and 7 single cubes. How many cubes does Sally have?
(Russell et al. 2008l). I modified the problem for Kristen by changing 3 towers of
10 cubes to 2 towers of 10 cubes. I asked Kristen to work with a partner to model
the revised problem with cubes to solve it. Sometimes I paired Kristen with a stu-
dent who had similar needs, especially when I wanted to provide both students
with individualized practice or support. In this case, Kristen’s partner was a stu-
dent who benefited from talking through her work with someone to solidify her
own thinking. When I checked in, Kristen had disconnected from her partner
and appeared to be struggling. I asked her to build the towers of 10 and singles so
that we could think about the problem together. Once she had the cubes organ-
ized, I asked her to count. She pointed to the towers of 10 and counted, “10, 20.”
Then she continued counting the 7 single cubes, “30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90.” I
removed one of the towers and asked her to count again. This time she counted,
“10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.” When I returned the tower of 10, she again
counted to 90.
Once again, we had moved away from the problem at hand and I found my-
self exploring where Kristen’s understanding fell apart. The accommodation that
I had made with the tower activity was not addressing her needs. Now I wondered
what counting meant to Kristen beyond being able to use the counting sequence
to count a set of objects up to 20. Is she ready to count by more than 1s? Does
she understand that 24 is 2 10s and 4 1s?
LINKINGASSESSMENT ANDTEACHING