Help your students build their reasoning and sense making by introducing a variety of number talks into your warm up routine 1-3 times a week.

These 5-7 minute talks will increase the level of discourse and problem solving strategies of your students.

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Reasoning and sense making book (p.80) - "Arithmetic tasks should be chosen or designed in such a way that, through rich classroom conversations, children have the opportunity to notice the fundamental properties and think about efficient strategies for computing. We know that even very young students, when provided well-designed tasks supported by classroom instruction, are capable of recognizing structure (SMP 7a), making generalizations, and generating meaningful and efficient strategies on their own (SMP 1c, h; PS 1a). Even if only one student proposes a particular strategy, the opportunity arises to engage the rest of the class in thinking about it and building new mathematical knowledge (PS 1b.)."

 

Number Talks Build Numerical Reasoning 

p.199 - During number talks, students are asked to communicate their thinking when presenting and justify - ing solutions to problems they solve mentally. These exchanges lead to the development of more accurate, efficient, and flexible strategies.

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.202 - pWe can extract five essential components of a classroom number talk from Johnson’s classroom vignette: the classroom environment and community, classroom discussions, the teacher’s role, the role of mental math, and purposeful computation problems (Parrish 2010)

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p.202-A first step toward establishing a respectful classroom learning community is acceptance of all ideas and answers—regardless of any obvious errors. Rich mathematical discussions cannot occur if this expectation is not in place. We must remember that wrong answers are often rooted in misconceptions, and unless these ideas are allowed to be brought to the forefront, we cannot help students confront their thinking.

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p.203 -The benefits of sharing and discussing computation strategies are highlighted below. Students have the opportunity to do the following: • Clarify thinking. • Investigate and apply mathematical relationships. • Build a repertoire of efficient strategies. • Make decisions about choosing efficient strategies for specific problems. • Consider and test other strategies to see if they are mathematically logical

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p.204-Since the heart of number talks is classroom conversations focused on making sense of mathematics, it is appropriate for the teacher to move into the role of facilitator

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p.204-As we move toward listening to our students’ thinking instead of concentrating on only a final, correct answer and one procedure, we will begin to ask open-ended questions. By changing our question from, What answer did you get? to How did you solve this problem? we will be able to understand how students are making sense of the mathematics.

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p.204-One purpose of a number talk is for students to focus on number relationships and use these relationships to develop efficient, flexible strategies with accuracy.

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p.204-During initial number talks, problems are often written in horizontal format to encourage student’s thinking in this realm

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Another number talks website

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Second Grade Number Talks resource

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Another math resource site