A Little Help Goes A Long Ways

One of my favorite number routines is, of no surprise, the Number Talk. But perhaps my SECOND favorite is a "number of the day" exercise we do in our journals during our calendar work. We count the number of days we've been in school, adding a sticker to a ten frame each and every day.

Oh! Quick bird walk. This is not my idea, by any means, but it changed my life, so just in case you don't do it yet, here it is....quick and powerful, and it requires no brain power from me. Could it be more perfect? I used to have the calendar set that had the straws? Where you'd count the day, and add a straw to the little pouch labeled "ones" each day...then when you had 10 straws you'd bundle those up with a rubber band and move them to the pouch labeled with "tens". Nevermind, here:

Okay but many years ago I switched to this:

And never looked back. Never once did my kiddos ever say "We're almost at ten" when I used the straws. We just kept counting them every day. Over and over. But with the dots on the ten frames, they suddenly started saying it spontaneously..."Two more days until ten! We almost have another ten! Here comes another ten day...let's see...four more days, and it's Thursday today....so we should have ten on Wednesday." I do not jest or exaggerate. And as for my teaching? I did exactly zero differently. These babies teach themselves. And, bonus time, when you fill them in side to side, you get to talk about odds and evens every day because the dots have a partner...or they don't.


Okay, back to the point. Number of the Day is another math routine that I love a lot. It's perfect for getting kids to use the properties of arithmetic...like commutative, associative, identity...you know, Big Ideas. Each day, the number of the day is the number of days we've been in school. We start with, "You have to make that number five different ways"...On the tenth day of school, you have to start making the numbers ten different ways....on the twentieth day of school, it's 20 days. Kids find patterns (plus one/minus one compensations for addition and minus one/minus one or plus one/plus one compensation for subtraction) plus what happens when you add/subtract zero, and whether the commutative property works for addition AND subtraction...it all comes up, even when you are just trying to make the number 1! Such a boon, I love it.

Here's sweet, hard working Alex. I spot check the journals the first few weeks of school (and then every few weeks after that, as comfort sometimes breeds laziness in these activities), and this is what I found in Alex's journal as he was recording the ways for day number 14...which means, he should have been making 14 over and over.

Oopsy! That won't do! So I showed him how to use unifix cubes (and keep getting another one for each new day, to add to his train) and then we practiced breaking the train into parts, counting those parts, and recording what we did.

 

He's currently recording it strictly as addition, but we'll work on relating what he's doing to subtraction as the weeks progress. Two great things came of doing it this way:

Here's his journal just a few days later, for day 17. {LOVE} And the second thing is a different student was having a similar struggle and I said, "Hey, Alex, why don't you show your strategy to Vineet?" So he did. And that moment, when he was showing somebody else what he could do, that  my friends, was a magical moment for The Boy Who Struggled.