What is Number Sense and Why It’s So Essential

Building Number Sense, Number Sense, Subitizing | 15 comments

The number one concern I hear from teachers is that their students struggle with number sense and they want to build that for their kiddos. However, although we know our kiddos don’t have a good sense of numbers, it’s hard to define what Number Sense is. If you don’t...

Fact Fluency Part 3: The Power of Subitizing

Building Number Sense, Subitizing | 4 comments

 Fact Fluency Part 1                        Fact Fluency Part 2 Have you ever had a student that when you put up 4 fingers and asked them “How many fingers do I have?” they had to count each finger one-by-one?  That happens way too often in early...

Fact Fluency Part 2: Build Number Sense to Build Fact Fluency

Building Number Sense, Fact Fluency | 3 comments

Have you ever seen a 5th-grade student count on their fingers to add 7 + 8?  Or a 6th grader doing repeated addition on their paper to solve 9 x 7?  If you haven’t, I can guarantee you’ve heard the stories from the upper grades teachers during staff meetings as they...

Fact Fluency Part 1:  4 Types of Addition & Multiplication Facts

Building Number Sense | 1 comment

Fact Fluency Part 2         Fact Fluency Part 3 As I was looking over my presentation for this week at NCTM and getting sidetracked by checking Tweets about NCSM (which I didn’t get to attend this year), I saw a few tweets about Steven Leinwand and Patsy Kanter’s...

5 Math Games That Decrease Your Prep Time

Building Number Sense, TMWYK | 1 comment

Many of you know that I am a HUGE proponent of using math games to build your students’ mathematical minds.  However, the biggest complaint is that math games take so much time to prepare and then you have to teach the new game to the kids before they can go off...

Christmas Math Center Activities 2014

Building Number Sense, Subitizing | 0 comments

I love Christmas.  I love it even more now that I have kids of my own.  I love seeing their faces light up on Christmas morning.  But one of my favorite things I get to do now is going into my children’s classrooms the last day before their Christmas break to do...