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March/April 2007
Teachers should:
1. Build on children’s current knowledge
2. Select learning objectives that are a natural next step for children
3. Make sure children consolidate one level of understanding before
moving on to the next
4. Give children opportunities to use number concepts in a broad
range of contexts and to learn words for describing quantity in
each context (bigger, farther, heavier, hotter)
Activities should:
• Expose children to the major ways numbers are represented
and talked about
• Provide opportunities to link quantities, counting words,
and symbols
• Provide visual and spatial analogs of number representations
for hands-on learning, such as horizontal or vertical number lines
children can use to represent and visualize quantity transactions
• Capture children’s imaginations so knowledge is embedded
not only in their minds but in their hopes, fears, and passions
• Provide opportunities to acquire computational fluency as
well as conceptual understanding
• Require the use of metacognitive processes (problem-solving,
communication, reasoning) to help children construct knowledge
Source: Adapted from S. Griffin, “Fostering
the Development of Whole Number Sense,” in M.S. Donovan and
J.D. Bransford, How Students Learn.
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