The AMAZING power and potential of Number of the Day

It isn't often that I point out what a particular Brassfield teacher is doing, because the honest truth is that every single teacher in this school does wonderful, amazing, innovative things in math every single day. Sometimes I think that the best part of my job, aside from my favorite part of working with the kids, is having the chance to see so many wonderful ideas put into place in various classrooms. If only we were all omnipotent and could be in several places at once, there is much to be learned in this school full of AMAZING professionals.

I had the good fortune of spending some time in a first grade class today and walked away feeling like a million bucks. One thing I hear myself saying quite often is that teachers are under so much pressure to teach a very compressed curriculum that often we lose sight of (or don't have time for) activities that promote number sense, fluency, and flixibility in mathematical thinking and learning. So it was a wonderful surprise to work with a teacher today who ensures that her students have access to number sense and flexible thinking EVERY SINGLE DAY during her "number of the day" activities. In an activity that takes fewer than ten minutes, every student in her class is completely engaged in an array of activities having to do with a single number.

Today's number was 25. The students broke this number into 10s and 1s, figured out which coins could make this number, determined if it was an even or odd number, chose the number before and after it PLUS 10 before and 10 after it, wrote it in expanded form and word form, used tally marks to represent it, whether it was greater than, less than, or equal to yesterday's number of the day, how it is represented using tens frames, and more. Have I mentioned that this was a classroom of FIRST GRADERS on the 8TH day of school???

Wow. Here's a picture of this teacher's Number of the Day bulletin board. I'm taking notes...