Dear 5R Families,

During our Parent/Student/Teacher conferences just before the holidays, many of us discussed the benefit of taking time for further exploration and foundation-building in your child’s number sense.

At that time, I offered to put together a set of resources that families could use at home to help build a deep, foundational understanding of number. I also mentioned to many of you that I would prefer if the bulk of these learning experiences were interactive. By interactive I mean things that you and your child, or your child and their siblings, could do together. This is as opposed to being strictly online challenges. The idea is that you spend some time with your child, playing games and solving problems together. Enjoy!

I have begun to put together a page of these resources on our G5 Resources site, under the NUMBER SENSE tab. At the moment there are a range of articles about number sense, games to download, print and play, and games that just require a few dice and some paper. Additionally, there are a couple things that can be done independently online. I would be happy to continue adding suggestions, but would appreciate some feedback. Please let me know how these selections work for you and your child.

An excerpt from one of the articles:

What is number sense?

The term “number sense” is a relatively new one in mathematics education. It is difficult to define precisely, but broadly speaking, it refers to “a well organised conceptual framework of number information that enables a person to understand numbers and number relationships and to solve mathematical problems that are not bound by traditional algorithms” (Bobis, 1996). The National Council of Teachers (USA, 1989) identified five components that characterise number sense: number meaning, number relationships, number magnitude, operations involving numbers and referents for numbers and quantities. These skills are considered important because they contribute to general intuitions about numbers and lay the foundation for more advanced skills.

This week Grade 5 will launch our first Math Camp, an opportunity for students to review and extend upon concepts from our first unit of math study. Students were offered a range of eight choices and descriptions, offered by eight teachers. They have chosen, and been guided to choose an interesting and appropriate menu item.

For students coming to 5R, we will have an extension challenge focused on… Hot Dogs!

This morning 5R spent some time exploring the relationship between place value columns and exponential values of ten, or powers of ten.

First we looked at some visualizations of large numbers, starting here, and then continuing on here.

Then we looked at a teacher example, an earlier version of the video below, finding powers of ten in the environment. Afterwards, students for busy starting to build their own video representations of place value charts.

While the content we were exploring focused on the relationships between place value and the exponential values of ten, we were equally focusing on the research skills of finding, organizing and presenting information.

Keep an eye out for student videos, coming to their blogs soon!

Powers of Ten from ZIS Grade 5 Mr Raskin on Vimeo.