Therefore, I strongly believe at the Grade Two level, this skill should have been mastered by students but now I see where I had to intervene to facilitate these students for them to be on par with the other class population. Numbers and symbols are abstract for children so one to one correspondence is the connection between the symbol, the language and the quantity (Kearns, 2010). This means that while they can count they may not understand the meaning or value of the numbers. Young children often learn to count without having an understanding of one to one correspondence. According to Kearns (2010), one to one correspondence is the ability to match an object to the corresponding number and recognize that numbers are symbols to represent a quantity. Therefore, my research problem is to find out why Grade Two students have not mastered the basic mathematical skill of stable order counting in relation to one to one correspondence.
Due this, I have realized that as an aspiring teacher, I need to do further studies into this problem to see what strategies I can implement to improve these Grade Two students to reach mastery level of understanding stable order counting. However, what I then noticed as I made some checks by walking around and observing what was being done by students, there were six persons out of the twenty-five (25) students present who had some serious problems with counting and one to one correspondence. One question was done for students and they answered in a chorus to provide the answer. It was also evident that students were not able to read or understand the written instructions that was provided for each section of the test from Section A, B and C. In addition, when I walked around the classroom to see if students understood the instructions given on the test, it was evident that some students were just writing and guessing the amount of objects that were in each set. As students were engaged into the lesson by copying from the board, some students were not able to count within an orderly manner, the amount of objects that were placed in a given set. The results from the test allowed me (the researcher) to identify the misconceptions, challenges and problems the students faced in relation to mastering the skill of stable order counting.
An assessment task was given in my first week of observation which geared towards assessing, evaluating and retrieving evidence of the issue above. This problem was manifested while I was on my Fourth Year Teaching Practicum. This chapter will also state and explain a strategy that was used to eliminate students’ failure to exhibit the mathematical skill of stable order counting in relation to one to one correspondence. This chapter will introduce the problem that prevailed consistently for the majority of the class when students were given an assessment task. This chapter will provide an overview of previous observations and interactions that I had encountered when teaching a group of grade two students ranging from ages 7 to 8 years old at an urban school. Description and Background to the Problem
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