This was the first full week of school in New York City! As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with teachers about routines. Veteran teachers know the importance of setting routines and new teachers quickly learn that without routines, the best planned lessons quickly fall apart.
While routines for classroom management are super important, they aren’t what I want to talk about. I’m more interested in setting routines that help develop mathematical thinking– especially number sense.
Counting circles are a perfect example of such a routine. Once you set the routine, the counting circle can be used in many different ways and in many different grades to develop number sense. I learned all about them from the one and only Sadie. Definitely read her post to learn more. I also highly recommend reading more about them in Number Sense Routines even if you don’t teach K-3.
The other book I’ve been loving is High Yield Routines. It’s an easy read and I got a lot of great ideas from it. Here’s one I’ve been playing with.
Today’s Number Students are given a carefully chosen number and asked to list everything they know about it. Students then generate different representations of the number–drawings, equations, examples. Through discussion about the different representations, student can be pushed to think about different ways to decompose and recompose today’s number.
What I love about this is that it can be easily adapted to different grades. Today’s Number can be a whole number, a fraction, decimal, a negative number, an irrational number and so on… In addition, students can access the task at whatever level they are at. Some may have only one representation, others may have many that they can begin to compare and contrast.
For me, this would work well as a Do Now. Maybe I would do it once a week or maybe more at the beginning or the year. It can also be used as part of your homework and the discussion can take place at the start of class. I also think it might be neat to share with parents as an activity they can do at home with their kids. However you use it, I think it’s a great routine to start at the beginning of the year and track how students’ number sense builds throughout the year.
I’d love to know what you think.
What routines do you use that help students build number sense?