Number Talks - Session 5

Number talks have great potential in our primary maths lessons. There are many benefits in doing number talks including: students work in partners or groups of 3 to share their thinking and to problem solve, which allows students to feel more comfortable in taking risks and sharing ideas; more students have the opportunity to communicate their understanding; after students come together and share with the class, they can see that there are many ways to solve a problem; they get many opportunities to ‘play’ with numbers.

Students learn more about number sense. They can begin to see maths as a flexible subject and to start using and seeing numbers flexibly. They begin to realize and understand that there is not only one way to find an answer. Making mistakes is okay and encouraged – we can learn from our mistakes. The answer is not as important as thinking about and sharing the methods that they used. I still have students that think ‘faster is smarter’. Doing these number talks teaches students that there are more ways to show how to be a good mathematician.

Number talks work well because they teach number fluency and automaticity at the same time as teaching a conceptual understanding of number. It was also emphasized in session 5 how important it is for students to see visual representations as often as possible when learning mathematical concepts.

2 goals for the rest of this school year: provide opportunities for number talks and to try dot cards (or ten frames) in addition to calculation problems. I often have students share their thinking for solving math problems, however I have not used number talks as an explicity teaching method or as a consistent routine, nor have I spent such a long amount of sharing time on one problem. It is necessary sometimes to spend a significant amount of time on this so teachers and students can go deeper into problem solving and really get the sense of flexible numbers. At first I thought the dot cards looked more appropriate for younger ages, but as Jo Boaler said, it can be used all the way up to high school to help students develop their number sense. A quick search on google showed that there are many ideas for using dot cards and ten frames to deepen number sense.