Kindergarten Number Sense

Hello all and welcome to my Blog! For my first week I wanted to start off with something I could directly apply to my classroom today. I work with kindergartners and as of right now they have not started their math work for the year.

After the Professor showed us the Next Generation Mathematics and Learning Standards for New York I became very interested in figuring out how these new standards could apply to my class. So for this week I wanted to take a look into that.

There seem to be 2 main areas of learning in these standards. The first being counting and learning numbers. The second learning shapes and how they relate to their environment. This week I would like to look at the first and see how I can better help my students learn and use numbers. If you are interested in looking into these for your class you can find the information here: NY Standards

Here are the goals I will be looking at today:
1. Through their learning in the Counting and Cardinality and Operations and Algebraic Thinking domains, students:
 • develop a more formal sense of numbers;
• use numbers, including written numerals, to represent quantities and to solve quantitative problems, such as counting objects in a set; counting out a given number of objects; comparing sets or numerals; and modeling simple joining and separating situations with sets of objects, or eventually with equations such as 5 + 2 = 7 and 7 – 2 = 5. Note: Kindergarten students should see addition and subtraction equations, and student writing of equations in kindergarten is encouraged, but it is not required; and
• choose, combine, and apply effective strategies for answering quantitative questions, including quickly recognizing the cardinalities of small sets of objects, counting and producing sets of given sizes, counting the number of objects in combined sets, or counting the number of objects that remain in a set after some are taken away

Here are some ways I found to help students with these objectives in mind:

Developing Number sense can be fun for students at this age. At the end of the day getting these kids to learn number sense comes down to practice and repetition. Fortunately these can be fun. Please see below for some ideas on how to make it fun and see this website as it is where I got the info from Number sense printables

Aside from that there are a lot of other ways to get students involved. I found a great video that will walk you through an exercise that I think will be very effective.

My take away from this weeks post is that at the early ages the more imaginative and interactive you can make the work the better it will be for the students learning. While using blocks is a great way to give them a hands on look at numbers. I feel that I should be a little more creative so that the kids can get a little more excited.