Flexible Fingers – The Many Ways to Show Numbers with Fingers

Transcript

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to: Flexible Fingers – The Many Ways to Show Numbers with Fingers

Last week I reshared an old video about using math games in the classroom with Dan Finkel and while watching Dan’s video, he showed 3 with his fingers and I had recently finished editing Part 3 of the Missing Part Activities series in which I showed the number 3 with my fingers and it struck me how both Dan and I represented 3 with our fingers differently.

Here is how Dan shows 3 (he has his pinky & ring fingers down with the middle, index and thumb up):

And how I show 3 (3 middle fingers up with thumb & pinky touching):

The way Dan shows 3 is the way to show 3 for American Sign Language and how I show it is actually the 6 when signed in isolation.  

My natural instinct is obviously to show it the way I did in my video, it’s a hard habit to break but I also want kids to see quantities in lots of ways as well, like showing 3 using two hands.  Let me know in the comments of the video how you show 3. What’s your natural instinct?

I remember a video when my two oldest kids were super young and we were sitting at the dining table having breakfast. I’ll show it at the end of this video because a lot of people just listen to this via the podcast so I’ll just explain it for right now.  My daughter showed 5 with all fingers up on one hand with her palm facing me.  My oldest son asked “wanna see my 5?” and he showed 5 with his palm facing himself and fingers pointed to the side instead of up because he wanted to show it differently than his sister. 

So I asked them “How else can you show 5?” My daughter didn’t know and she turned to look at her brother.  Well all he had, was to flip his hand around and put the finger up.  

All they knew was 5 was all fingers up. Then my husband jumped in and said “Like this?” and showed 3 fingers on one hand with 2 fingers on the other and I asked “Is that 5?” and they proceeded to count the fingers to determine if it was 5.

They could subitize 5 when it was in the traditional format but when presented differently they had to count.  So with this video I just want to bring to the forefront of your mind to not always use the same finger configuration when showing quantities so that kids don’t think that is the only way to show it.

However, do keep in mind that ASL has a specific way to show numbers, but we do want kids to see those small quantities in lots of different ways. So if it isn’t with fingers, check all your visuals you are using.  Do you ways show quantities the same way in ten frames?  Do you always show it the same way on a rekenrek?  If so, try varying it to give kids a deeper understanding of what the quantity means and looks like.

Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.