November Number Talks Picks!

Hey Kinder Friends,

Just had to share our favorite Number Talking book picks for November! These are super simple and pretty cheap to come by so they are on the top of the list for our Number Talking fun. I ordered them through Amazon because I wanted to be able to have extra copies for the class. Considering Number Talks are an ongoing routine in the classroom I am always on the hunt for anything and everything that will add to this routine to get us all excited about this part of our day.

First up is the One Little, Two Little, Three Little Pilgrims book. It is super simple. But what I love about it most is that it serves as double duty for me. We read it and discuss the three ways to read a book and discuss retelling the story through the pictures. This is a great book for that because on most of the pages the children can read each word on the page but on some they must use the pictures to retell that part. It also incorporates one of our sight words "little" so the children see it in print many times throughout the book. And we all love counting the number on each page just to make sure 10 really is 10... To incorporate this into Number Talks, we add tools such as the Rekenrek or Magnetic Ten Frames to represent the number we see. And we are getting pretty good by now because we see numbers in different ways which lends to a richer Number Talk. This week I heard a lot of talk about one more because sometimes it was hard to find that last one on the page which gave us a great opportunity to talk about counting and recounting.

After our Number Talking routine, I was able to use the book to discuss counting and recounting with the class by using the same book as a starting point. After looking at my monitoring notes I knew that there were still children that do not use an organized method for counting objects. This gave me an opportunity to connect some of the things that I heard in Number Talks and help me plan for instruction for small groups of students or the class as a whole. So, in a sense, our Number Talking routine serves as an assessment of what the children know because the focus is communicating mathematically during Number Talks and you have the opportunity to hear and record the thinking of the children. And the benefit of this routine also gives the other children the opportunity to hear and see the thinking or applied strategies of other children.

As we strut into the last week before Thanksgiving we will be reading and incorporating 10 Fat Turkeys into our Number Talks because you have to have a little fun, right?

And it just would not be complete if we didn't countdown to Thanksgiving too! Oh my word do we ever love a countdown! Seriously, don't ask twice because we "got" this countdown thing! I swear we could countdown from like a million to any important event. WAIT, let me go make an assessment checklist for that...got ya!