For the past 3 cycles I’ve tried to start my class with a 5 minute Number Sense routine for my class. These have most often been number talks in format. I have come up with a few number talks trying to get at mathematical ideas that I think are worth reviewing with my kids. They have been somewhat successful, some kids really get into it, others roll their eyes, but on the whole it has been pretty positive.

The idea behind the number talks was to give the kids some way to build confidence around concepts with number, operations and proportional reasoning each day. The talks themselves are the little powerpoint openers that I put on the screen and go through each day. Here is an example (and a folder with a bunch of them):

Before the routine each day I remind kids that the talks are about thinking building up the kind of number sense they will need in order to be successful in school and in regular life. We use the “thumb” method to indicate that they have thought of something, and once the thumbs have all come up I’ll showcase individual ways that students thought about the problem. I’m trying to get better at not injecting my strategies because it has turned into a “Carl on stage” routine a few times by mistake. Then we go on to the next problem and during the awkward moment while we wait for thumbs to come up we end up, I’ll point to some of the strategies that other people have used to solve the earlier problems.

I’m keeping with them despite some struggles. A few students don’t seem to engage and almost seem like they are waiting me out. Waiting longer eats into the lesson, and talking to those students or looking at those students seem to kill the class culture, so I worry about that. One idea may be to have some kind of number talks related to the topic at hand, in addition to being about earlier math topics. That might help validate the activity for students.