Growing Number Sense

 What is number sense and why is it so important?  Why do we need children to develop number sense particularly in the early years of their school journey?  Number sense is simply the ability to understand number and how numbers can be connected.  A strong understanding of number developed in the early years helps children develop confidence, flexible thinking and a love of maths.

I have been working more closely with a group of children who entered school not having a strong number sense.  They were not confident in expressing ideas about numbers and remained silent during the class discussions we have daily about uses of numbers in their everyday world - how many children are at school today? If we share out the mandarins fairly can we have more than one mandarin each?   If yesterday was the sixth of June what is the date today?  I need 3 books for the Shooting Stars and 2 for the Astronauts - how many do I need altogether?

I use phrases such as "what do you think...?" and "I wonder..." to help the children share what they have learnt or how they managed to solve a problem.  All answers are accepted and discussed.  The children can see that all answers are valued and that there might not be only one way to solve a problem.  Time is given for children to "do their own thinking" and it is respected with a request not to call out but to put your hand up to show me if you think you have an answer.

When working with a range of concrete objects such as bugs, beans, dinosaurs, people and fruit I use simple phrases to talk about the relationships between groups and to match number symbols to quantities.  As there is one child who has not got a strong one to one counting number sense (able to identify and connect numbers verbally, symbolically and visually) when looking at two groups we try and work out "more" or "less" by directly comparing the groups one by one to see if the number of objects are the same or if there are more objects in one group.  

Others have improved their number sense by gaining one to one correspondence and knowing the number words in a counting sequence so they are able to use counting to answer questions.  Using tens frames to put items to be counted in a tidy pattern has helped those who "double count".  They are methodical in their counting, starting on the top row from left to right then the bottom row.

 

One can now see the importance of language.  Yes, we may practice counting and grouping but we also talk about relationships and explore and play with numbers.   The children are not simply sharing an answer.  They are learning to describe how and why, what they did that worked and explaining how was it different or the same as other answers.  They need a lot of language to be able to explain, compare and justify.