Goals K-2

Number Talks K-2

(from Number Talks Helping Children Build Mathematical Thinking by Sherry Parrish)

What is the goal for using Number Talks in my classroom?

Four Goals for the K-2 Classroom:

1. Developing number sense

2. Developing fluency with small numbers

3. Subitizing

4. Making Tens

What does all that mean to me?

Number sense is an awareness and understanding about what numbers are, their relationships and their magnitude. This includes the use of mental mathematics and estimation.

Each time you use a number talk and have students share their answers, you are building number sense.

When you ask students to “estimate” an answer before solving a problem and have them provide evidence that an answer is reasonable, you are building number sense.

Number Sense foundational skills include:

  • Conservation of a number- understanding that the quantity of a given number of objects remains the same regardless of how it is spatially arranged.

  • One-to-one correspondence- ability to count a set of objects while understanding how a given quantity correlates to a specific number. Ex: a set of three cookies can be matched to three people. *This NOT the same as rote counting and matching a number name to an object.

Fluency with small numbers- fluency is knowing how a number can be composed and decomposed and using that information to be flexible and efficient with solving problems. *Fluency is NOT just basic fact recall*


Composing numbers – making a whole from parts

Decomposing numbers- breaking the whole into parts

Subitizing - the ability to immediately recognize a collection of objects as a single unit. This is an important component of computation at the lower grades.

Subitizing can be practiced with: dot images, rekenreks, and five- and ten-frames

Making Tens - making groups of tens provides a link to developing and understanding place value and out system of tens.

Essential skills include:

  • Understanding that ten ones can also be thought of as a single entity of one 10

  • Counting and organizing into groups of ten

  • Considering how many more are needed to have a group of ten

number talks cloud.png

Dot images

Rekenreks

Five-Frames/Ten-Frames

Number Lines

Hundred Chart

Tosha Weddle, Stewartsville Elementary School 2017