Math Understanders are dunking on this saying ‘guess you just don’t have Number-Sense bro’ but the issue is that it’s just phrased weirdly for someone who wasn’t in the class when this ‘a way to make a ten’ thing was introduced. I and presumably everyone who criticizes this Understands Numbers just fine, but I also don’t know what ‘using a way to make a ten to calculate 8+9’ means. I could try to infer it from context? Do you ‘make a ten’ with the 8 by grabbing 2 from the 9 leaving 7, hence 17? Do you ‘make a ten’ with the 9 and 1 from the 8, again leaving 7? Do you round both up to 10 getting 20, then take away the 2+1? I’m sure it’s something like that. Or rather, I don’t know what the heck else it could be. Either way, rest assured, I ‘have number-sense’! But ‘make a ten’ is a weirdly specific phrase and (again) since I wasn’t in class when the teacher talked about it, and it wasn’t a phrase ever used when I was learning arithmetic, I can’t have confidence I ‘know what it means’ and ‘know what the teacher is asking for’ per se, so if I’m the parent trying to help my kid who doesn’t know what to do, this leaves me frustrated. Math is not supposed to do that! The great thing about math is there are objective answers ascertainable by multiple methods, and all methods are right as long as the logic is correct. You’re not supposed to *have to* ‘do it the way the teacher was going for’. But this thing says the student *has to* ‘make a ten’. Simply must replicate the specific arcane phrase and method the teacher went through in class, other ways are deemed ‘incorrect’. This is essentially wordcel-thinking intruding into math. Wordcels probably like that because it aligns with what they like about education (=secret learning & phrasing dispensed by special experts using specific phrases you must learn and internalize) and not what they dislike (=math).

However hard or easy it is, 8 and 9 are the symbols we've learned to represent those numbers. The circles are a regression to counting. And then there's two sets of dots, some in a grid. It's as if the presence or absence of the grid means something to whoever printed it, but it utterly fails to communicate that meaning. Whatever they're trying to communicate, they should do it with digits, not by creating some new construct that competes with digits. That creates confusion, not clarity. And even if this helpful, it shouldn't be homework. It's a side quest. Students shouldn't be traded on the weird thing with the boxes and the dots. Perhaps as a rule of thumb, we shouldn't test children on things we don't expect them to use.