Having Empathy with my students

The problem that I am having in the classroom is getting my students to participate in math with the manipulatives in a productive way, rather than playing and building with them during the lesson.  During math time, we start off by counting to 100 by 1's, 2's, 5's, and 10's on the carpet. I then review what we have talked about recently and then begin to go over the lesson with my students, which currently is addition to 20.  The whole time my audience, kindergartners between the ages of 5-6, are sitting on the carpet, listening, with some physical movement. When they get up to go work on their own at the tables, and get manipulatives out, some children begin to do the math and participate, while a majority of them, begin to build and design things throughout the time.

To do my research, I joined my co teacher in her room while she taught a math lesson. While we don't teach the same, we do have the same age level and curriculum that we are going over, so it would allow for me to get a perspective similar to my problem, without having my students rush to me with a problem. The longest part was sitting through the directions of what we were doing and then waiting for others to finish the task. After waiting for other students to get everything together enough for us to move on, I was already creating lists of things to do in my head without even realizing it. I was beginning to see why some of my students were building and creating at this point, they were tired of waiting for whoever we were all waiting on. As we went through the lesson, I started to notice that some students would use different methods of adding, whether it was counting with fingers, drawing pictures, even one was using a number line, and began to see, while I should introduce the concept of using manipulatives, some children may not like having to use them and should be allowed to use their own methods. 

I did also notice that there were those students who still struggled with how to use them. If they did not understand the concept of taking a two groups and putting them together, I could see them begin to build structures with their blocks. As the lesson went on in time, I began to see students starting to lose focus, whether it be they were quietly talking, or beginning to build structures on the side. I even saw some students hoarding the blocks to make sure they had their own, while others would return them to their personal pencil box. I began to think about why they might be doing that. Was this one of the few toys they had? Did they not have physical toys of their own at home?

Through acting like a kindergartner, I began to see a variety of things that were a problem. It is hard to sit through a teacher speaking for 20 minutes. I am an adult, and I wasn't even a fan of it, but we all expect them to do it throughout the day like it is no problem. We also don't allow for independence for those who do understand the concepts. They could've continued on the worksheet no problem, without having to wait for the teacher. Some things were lost during that time because of having to wait to work on the next one as a class.  I also saw that while I may think that they all need to do with manipulatives, some students function better by drawing, or counting on their fingers. Each child has their own way of doing math, and while I am to show them a variety of ways, they are allowed to use whatever one they are most comfortable with. For the students who did chose to use manipulatives, some needed them constantly, while others were playing with them, which showed that it was not only my problem in the teaching world, but others had the same one. After doing the observation, I talked to my co teacher about those students playing. Almost all of them were on the low side of testing, and did not understand what we were doing on a day to day basis. So when toys come out, what would any 5 year old want to do with them, but play.