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What the Heck is a Rekenrek??

I am preparing for my presentation at the annual US Math Recovery conference and thought it would be a great time to post about one of my favorite math manipulatives for PreK through 2nd grade; the Rekenrek…which just so happens to be the focus of my presentation at the conference next week.  To start, here […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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Building Number Sense and Fraction Sense While #TMWYK

So this week, two situations arose involving my son’s food and math.  One built on some big ideas around Number Sense and the other built on his early Fraction Sense, but both gave me an opportunity to be Talking Math With Your Kids #TMWYK.   Scene #1: Building Number Bonds that Make 10 and Equality We […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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Number Sense Assessment

I’ve been working on a few books to give teachers (and parents) activities to help build number sense and develop flexibility with their addition facts.  It is one of my goals for the summer to complete them, but in the meantime I will be posting an activity each week.  This isn’t just to get you […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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Card Games to Develop Number Sense

I think almost everyone who teaches early elementary has heard about Make 10 Go Fish to help develop number sense around the benchmark number of 10.  But have you heard of Make Teen Go Fish?  Towards the end of the school year I got to attend a 2 day workshop by Illustrative Mathematics.  One of the […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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Savvy Subitizing Activity

This week for my Number Sense post I decided to share a set of cards that I developed to play a game adapted from the card game Ratuki®.  I love playing Ratuki® with my 6 YO, it is a great subitizing activity, but I wish the amounts shown on the cards went up higher and […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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Fact Fluency Part 2: Build Number Sense to Build Fact Fluency

Have you ever seen a 5th grade student count on their fingers to add 7 + 8?  Or a 6th grader doing repeated addition on their paper to solve 9 x 7?  If you haven’t, I can guarantee you’ve heard the stories from the upper grades teachers during staff meetings as they complain that “Kids […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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Fact Fluency Part 3: The Power of Subitizing

Have you ever had a student that when you put up 4 fingers and asked them “How many fingers do I have?” they had to count each finger one-by-one?  That happens way too often in early elementary classrooms.  Those children can count, but they are not subitizing and without being able to subitize a child […]

The Recovering Traditionalist

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