Capturing The Talk!

Hey Kinder Friends,

Someone asked me the other day how to keep Number Talks going all year in Kindergarten. As I walked away from the conversation it made me think. Sometimes we all get stuck and have no idea where to go. And sometimes all it takes is just listening to the kids to get you moving in the right direction.

As we were having math the other day I could hear the children saying... A 5 can be a 1 and a 4, a 5 and a 0 and so on. As other children walked by they would chime in and add to the conversation. Before I knew it they had successfully given all of the combinations to the numbers that they were discussing. Recently in class we have been talking a lot about decomposing numbers to 5. I thought that capturing their "talk" and adding a visual representation would help them build the same fluency with larger numbers. Much to my surprise capturing this one "talk" helped them with larger numbers and soon they began rapidly signaling other combinations to the larger numbers. Capturing this "talk" didn't take much time at all and you can see it really isn't beautiful handwriting or even pinworthy but it was a teachable moment that captured their thinking and helped us all move forward in our thinking about numbers.

I snapped the picture so that I would have it to remind me in those times when I feel stuck. Sometimes just listening to the kids is just what is needed to focus the next "talk" on. And interestingly enough the children were working with...

Yep, Legos when they were taking about number combinations, imagine that!