BOX 8.1 "Exceptional Kids" Mazie Jenkins was skeptical when first told that research shows that first-grade children can solve addition and subtraction word problems without being taught the procedures. When she saw videotapes of 5-year-old children solving word problems by counting and modeling, Mazie said they were exceptional kids because they could solve "difficult" word problems, such as: You have five candy bars in your Halloween bag; the lady in the next house puts some more candy bars in your bag. Now you have eight candy bars. How many candy bars did the lady in the next house give you?      Then Mazie tried out this problem with her first-grade class at the beginning of the year, and she excitedly reported, "My kids are exceptional too!" Mazie learned that, while she herself saw this problem as a "subtraction" problem--because she had been taught the procedure for doing the problem that way--her first graders solved the problem spontaneously, typically by counting out five unifix cubes (to represent candy bars), adding more cubes until they had eight, and then counting the number they had added to get to eight. Mazie's kids then proudly reported the answer as "three" (Carpenter et al., 1989).