In It to Win It: Kindergarten Mathematicians and Number Talks

Kindergarteners are amazing counters!! We promise FRIENDS that sometimes when we are doing number talks, we feel like we are teaching a bunch of genius mathematicians!! We started the year showing our kiddos dot formations up to six! You know we were subitizing (mentally training our kidddos to visualze items to know how many without counting every object)!! We love that word and we love the amazing number talks we are having with our kiddos.

We progressed gradually from using dot formations and ten frames with numbers 0-20! Having tranined our kiddos to recognize sets of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, etc... has truly gotten us tremendous results.

We would love to give away a flipchart we made to help guide our talks from 11-20. This flipchart works with Activinspire software and really helped guide our talks and helped our students become counting maniacs!!

Just leave us a comment about your number talks or what you think about ours. Don't forget to leave us an email address and we will pull the lucky winner out of a hat. Check out the preview of our flipchart. Let us know what you think.



When our kiddos look at the slide with 11 dots above, we ask them, "How many dots do you see?" Immediately many kiddos shout out 11. We say, "How do you know and what strategy did you use?" Their responses include...
"I see 5 and 5 and that is 10 and one more is 11."
"I see 10 and 1 more is 11."
"I counted by 5s then added 1."
"I counted doubles plus 1."
AMAZING... RIGHT!!!

Numbers 11-20 Counting and Cardinality: Number Talk Guide and Common Core