How to Implement Number Sense and Still Teach Your Curriculum

Last week I did a video all about what number sense is and I got some feedback like, “I know what this is, but now, how do I develop it?”  and “How do I develop it, especially when the curriculum I am using doesn’t have number sense activities?”

I also heard from second grade, and upper elementary teachers saying, “My kiddos still don’t have this number sense stuff, so how do I build number sense while also trying to do all of the standards that I need to do at their grade level?”

So, let’s take a look into a couple ways that you can start your school year off building that foundation of number sense, and in a way that it won’t totally interfere with the other things that you need to teach.

You can watch the video below or read through the transcript.

The Number Sense courses have been reworked and are now called The Flexibility Formula

Why Spend The Time To Develop Number Sense?

First thing I want to start off with is the need to be developing number sense because I will tell you in the feedback I got from last week’s video, there were middle school and high school teachers saying “My kiddos still struggle with it!”

So if you feel like, “I don’t have time to do this, I have to get on to my standards”, know that every grade level after you is gonna be saying the same thing. So, here’s a mantra that I teach teachers all the time to repeat to yourself: IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO????

If you don’t take the time to slow down and build that foundation for kiddos, who’s going to? Because every teacher feels like they never had enough time and it just gets worse in the upper grades. So, take the time, slow down, build their foundation of number sense and it will pay off.

It’s so amazing how once they grasp these understandings of number sense that we talked about in the last video, how fast they grasp onto so many of the other standards that we need to teach. So, today I want to talk about two things that if I hadn’t been doing something around number sense this is where I would start.

Quick Ways to Develop Number Sense 

The first thing that I want to encourage you to do is start developing some number sense routines.

Now, if you’re not familiar with Jessica Shumway’s book, Number Sense Routines, that’s a fabulous book. Go check it out, you can get lots of details in that. But, here are a few that I really want you to get started doing.

Quick Images

Quick images is just putting up images and asking the kids, how many do you see? So, this can be done through PowerPoints, it can be done by just creating little flash cards. If you go to my site, buildmathminds.com, and click on the Freebies section you can get some there. Like the Savvy Subitizing cards.  They have tally marks, finger patterns, the digits, the dot patterns, the rekenrek, and ten frames. You can download those and make your own off my website as well.

But it can be just making a PowerPoint and flashing up images just for a second, or so, and asking them, “how many do you see?” So that’s what quick images is; it’s just a quick image that disappears, and then you ask, how many did they see, and talk about what they saw.

Number Talks

Number talks are a fabulous way that you can, develop a routine in your classroom. There’s a book called Number Talks, there’s also Making Number Talks Matter. So I’m not going to go in depth on how to do those here, but if you’re not familiar with those check out Number Talks, by Sherry Parrish, and then, the book Making Number Talks Matter by Cathy Humphreys and Ruth Parker.

Counting Circles

Counting circles is another fabulous way to build kids’ number sense. It’s not just for whole numbers, either.  We do a lot of counting with whole numbers, but if you work with upper grades kids doing counting circles with decimals and fractions is so powerful.

Kids aren’t ever asked to count by tenths or by two thirds.  What does that look like and what kind of patterns do you notice?  You can Google counting circles and you can find out more details about that.

The cool part about developing a number sense routine, is they should only take five to 10 minutes to do.

You shouldn’t be spending your whole math lesson on it. Look at your schedule this year.  Is there a spot where maybe you’ve got five minutes here and there, before they’re going off to PE, or right before lunch time, that you could take to do a number sense routine and then have the rest of your math time to do your actual curriculum???

Subitizing Activities

The second piece I want to encourage you to do is subitizing.  No matter what grade level you work with, if kids have not been doing subitizing they need to start because it plays such a powerful role in a lot of what they’re doing.

Subitizing is just instantly recognizing. In early grades we see a lot of kiddos who struggle with knowing how many fingers are on one hand without having to count every single finger. Now, it seems like that should be just an early numeracy thing, but let’s fast forward to third, fourth, and fifth grade, when they’re working on multiplication.

If we’re asking kids to start out with understanding multiplication as “groups of”, so, 3 x 5 is three groups of five.  They first need a visual of what five is, before how can we ask them to understand what three groups of five is.

So, doing subtizing is not just for early numeracy, we take those understandings and we need to advance them into whatever concept we’re working on.  If they don’t have subitizing for small amounts then we’ve got to start there. Then move into what that looks like when we’re doing groups of.

One of the things that I’m super excited about, that I haven’t seen a whole lot of out there, if anything, is doing subitizing with fractions. I’m excited because I’ve been working with Graham Fletcher on some stuff, and he’s going to be releasing some subitizing fraction cards. If you work with upper elementary kiddos those are going to be so powerful. That’s a little tease, but when those are ready to go here in the next two weeks I will be letting you know about it.

I hope that this has given you a couple ideas about how you can incorporate number sense without it totally throwing your curriculum to the side, and help your kids build their math minds.