Number Talks PD

Good Sunday evening! This week in education I participated in a Number Talks (NT) workshop presented by Ann Dominick. I have been implementing NT for several years. So the information was not new material. It solidifies my belief that math discourse is an essential part of elementary school mathematics. Student expressing themselves mathematically. Students express their understanding of the problem and preserving to solve them; critique the reasoning of other students; and look for patterns in structures; choose tools strategically and appropriately. In essence, students, through NT, display math practice standards. I can remember having rich conversations on how to solve a particular problem and explaining to one another how to solve them problem. I can't wait to get back to school to start our NT journey. I did record myself engaging in NT with my students. I may post it later. One take away from this session is to start with dot images even at the upper elementary grade. I plan to read Dr. Parish's book and plan accordingly. Like stated above, I have engaged in NT with my fifth graders. One of the last topic were related to algebraic thinking. I chose this topic because most of them did not attained it on their benchmark assessments. So I gave them a problem like 20= N+7+5+3. This blew their mind because the equal sign was at the beginning of the problem. Knowing the meaning of the equal sign in an equation is a first grade standard. Through a series of NT like the above problem, students ascertained the true meaning of the equal sign. One of my goals for this blog is for other teachers to know that it is possible to have math discourse in any given setting. You just have to set the tone and culture of your math class.

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