Today's session aimed to help Nicholas understand that the two digits of a two-digit number represent amounts of tens and ones. He was shown that 10 can be thought of as a bundle of ten ones — called a “ten.” We used an abacus to facilitate his understanding of this concept and to demonstrate how the numbers from 11 to 19 are composed of a ten and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine ones. When Nicholas's attention waned, we used Lego blocks to facilitate understanding through manipulatives he could touch in the hopes it would help him better process the information. We worked on 2 pages of his activity worksheet assigned by his teacher, and did two additional pages in his math book to further show him how to visualize the groupings. Nicholas required a few prompts to help him remain focused on the task, but the manipulatives and use of hands-on models appears to aid comprehension. We reviewed the work we did the previous day, showing that the numbers 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 refer to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine tens (and 0 ones). Next, we showed how to decompose two-digit numbers in multiple ways (e.g., 64 can be decomposed into 6 tens and 4 ones or into 5 tens and 14 ones). Nicholas had greater difficulty understanding this and tended to just repeat the last number he heard or saw rather than take time to use the tools and strategies to figure out the answer. We will continue to work on this skill and concept which addresses understanding of number and operations in base ten cluster and place value. (Standard MAFS.1.NBT.2.2)