Number sense is so important in your students Mathematics development.
We believe it needs to be continually revisited throughout the year in order to develop and apply the skills to other areas of Math. It also helps with building your students confidence (which we all know can play a huge role in success!)
We created our number sense flowers, after getting bored with the same old number sense lessons we were delivering. We wanted our students to get excited about learning and for them to work with a resource that was beautiful but still had rigour.
Today we are sharing 5 different and engaging ways you can use our Number Flower templates in your classroom:
1. A Differentiated Math Station
Ask students to create a number with some dice to begin. You can have different students working on different sized numbers because we have included 6 versions in this resource for easy differentiation. Having every student working on the same task but using numbers targeted to their level means less prep for you, the teacher, and no student is feeling different or left out. Allowing them to choose their own numbers also helps them be accountable for the task itself.
2. Create a Garden Number Line
This is a beautiful math display as well as an authentic activity where you will be able to model creating number lines with your students. Either ask your students to complete a number flower each and then work in groups at the end of the lesson to create a number line with their flowers as a team. Alternatively, you can do this as a whole class task and make a class garden number line. If you decide to go down this track we highly advise you to give students a small range of numbers to work with (otherwise the number line becomes crazy long and/or not accurate).
3. Portfolio Task
Our number flowers are a different way to present your students number knowledge to showcase to parents and use as a summative assessment. The best part of this is students aren’t going to feel like they are completing an assessment!!
4. Rotating Flowers
Students work in small groups of 7 and choose a number (we recommend mixed ability groups for this activity). They then rotate the flower around the group, filling out one petal each. Before they start on their petal, they need to check the person’s answer before them, encouraging peer mentoring and collaboration. This task is a great way to build classroom community and have students help each other without them even knowing it.
5. Go digital!
Using a digital version is an awesome way to mix up the learning for the technology natives in our classroom. The awesome news is, we have created a digital version that comes along with this resource! It is super easy to use and kid-friendly too.
This highly engaging resource will have your students learning and demonstrating their understanding of place value and numbers. The best part is, you will be reusing and recycling a resource and saving some of your precious teacher time!
Grab your copy of our number sense flowers here:
Before you leave us…
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• Suggested hands-on activities for Kindergarten – Grade 6
• Masterclass videos with accompanying workbook
• Student notes and observations template
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