New Beginnings!!!



Fall Semester 2019


New Beginnings with New Preservice Teachers!!!

This blog post is about the first Number Talks for the new semester. The goal for this Number Talk is to introduce the practice with a new group of Preservice Teachers (PST) in math methods. NT is really taken off in Madison County, and I want to make sure my PST are well versed in the practice.
This NT includes dot images. The focus for NT using dot images is to builds accuracy, flexibility, and efficiency strategies in counting (Parrish, 2011). According to Russell (2000), "Accuracy" denotes the ability to produce an accurate answer; "efficiency" denotes the ability to choose an appropriate, expedient strategy for a specific computation problem; and "flexibility" refers to the ability to use number relationships with ease in computation.
 Instead of seeing items singularly, students can figure the amount of dots by grouping them.
The below  are the dot images for the first NT.  The questions  presented  are "How many did you see?" and "How do you see them?".

       A
B






C






The class is very small. Another student will join us next week. Therefore, all of PST participated in NT. They were able to group dots together  by seeing them in groups of 4 in sets A and C. One of them noticed she couldn't just count by 2 because it would have taken too long. She notice that counting by 2's is not a efficient strategy to figure out the amount of dots. This is important when building students' counting strategies especially when items are more numerous. PST stated their apprehension about the NT progression with larger quantities. 

References
Russell, Susan Jo. 2000. Developing Computational Fluency with Whole Numbers. Teaching Children Mathematics 7(3): 154–58

Parrish, S. (2011). Number talks build numeric reasoning. Teaching Children Mathematics,18(3),  198-206.







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