Mrs Miles Essay

Mrs. Miles teaches moderate and severely disabled students in a self-contained classroom. Weekly, she takes her students to a local grocery store and lets them practice purchasing and price comparison to gain budgeting skills as well as independence. Since there is a limitation of real setting opportunities for the students to practice their price comparisons, she has to find another strategy to teach them. This article is to help her find a way to teach her students multi-digit number comparison, included in comparing prices. For a student to be able to achieve number comparison, several math concepts have to be understood and demonstrated by the student. Comparing multi-digit numbers as well as decimal placement can be very challenging to teach. Not only do students have to recognize the magnitude of the price on the tag, they have to be able to locate the item in the store, and also be able to compare values of numbers. This can all be hard to teach since the

The holistic model includes comparing multi-digit numbers as a whole by picturing their position on a number line. In the holistic model, you can also put the decimal places in fractions over their place value and compare them. The downfall of the holistic model is that some students haven’t developed an extended number line mentally so they can’t compare large numbers with decimals. The decomposition model compares numbers by their place value position in each given number. The downfall of the decomposition model is that students may encounter price pairs that contain numbers that do not have the same place value (example: $7.66 versus $12.43). Mrs. Miles finishes by using the decomposition-only model because she felt that the decimals were hard to understand and that her students did not have a solid grasp of a mental number