Easter Observation

During the Easter break, Rina and Emi visited Mark's (assumed name) home and had activities with him in the living room. Mark is a five years old boy who attends kindergarten five days a week. Mark is Emi's nephew, we brought Easter eggs for Mark to motivate his interest toward activities. With the trust relationship between Emi and Mark and the supportive atmosphere in Mark’s home, the activities ran smoothly. Mark engaged in three activities including number sense and addition activity, the combination of mathematical language and numbers activity, and coins activity. During the interactions, one educator observed and took notes, while the other educator initiated activities and managed the process.

The first activity was number sense and addition activity. Educator showed five magnets stuck on a whiteboard in a random pattern and asked, ‘How many are there?' Mark provided a correct answer by slowly counting ‘One, two, three, four, five' while looking at the board. To examine whether Mark could recognise the amount of the magnets without counting, the educator changed the number of magnets each time, presented the board and quickly flipped over the board. When the educator asked …show more content…
He could not recognise the numbers of magnets quickly during the short duration. However, Mark demonstrated cardinality counting, evidenced by he knew that the final number represented the total amount of the items in the collection (Jordan, 2007). He applied figurative counting method in the activity. Also, he was successful in simple addition, which involved the abstraction counting principle. Overall, Mark may be more inclined to reach the figurative level due to he did not rely on visible items or fingers as visual aids to apply addition in the process (Jordan et al., 2006). His subitising skill needs to be strengthened, due to it is described as the foundation form of quantity recognition skill (Kaufman et al.,