We have spiraled back to working on building our number sense. Today students worked with a partner to count a large quantity of an item. Students need to understand that making groups of ten is an efficient way of counting large quantities. By allowing students to explore counting using a variation of group sizes it helps them build a relationship between counting and quantity. This also allowed them an opportunity to represent a number with hundreds, tens and ones and representing that in a numeral. Some students understood that their group of objects had 11 groups of tens and 3 ones but then represented the numeral with 103 or 1103 or 10013. Through our conversations over the next several days we will strengthen our understanding of the importance of place value and what they mean.
Another interesting side conversation we had was about how to organize their groups of ten to allow for systematic, easy counting. Some groups had their groups of ten scattered over a space and they would skip over a group or count a group twice when trying to figure out their final number.
A way to practice this skill at home is to have them count legos, beans, buttons, action figures or any collection of an object! Once they have counted the collection have them record the number to see if they can transpose it correctly onto paper.
Another interesting side conversation we had was about how to organize their groups of ten to allow for systematic, easy counting. Some groups had their groups of ten scattered over a space and they would skip over a group or count a group twice when trying to figure out their final number.
A way to practice this skill at home is to have them count legos, beans, buttons, action figures or any collection of an object! Once they have counted the collection have them record the number to see if they can transpose it correctly onto paper.