Use young children's quick attention to numerosity to evaluate their grasp of number while they engage in game play.

Developing an understanding of place value and the base-ten number system is considered a fundamental goal of the early primary grades. For years, teachers have anecdotally reported that students struggle with place-value concepts. Among the common errors cited are misreading such numbers as 26 and 62 by seeing them as identical in meaning,…

Exploring number systems of other cultures can be an enjoyable learning experience that enriches students' knowledge of numbers and number systems in important ways. It helps students deepen mental computation fluency, knowledge of place value, and equivalent representations for numbers. This article describes how the author designed her…

Elementary school teachers are responsible for constructing the foundation of number sense in youngsters, and so it is recommended that teacher-training programs include an emphasis on number sense to ensure the development of dynamic, productive computation and estimation skills in students. To better prepare preservice elementary school teachers…

Although increasing emphasis is being placed on mathematical justification in elementary school classrooms, many teachers find it challenging to engage their students in such activities. In part, this may be because the teachers themselves have not had an opportunity to learn what it means to justify solutions or prove elementary school concepts…

Since 2001, the authors have been working with groups of teachers to investigate students' early algebraic thinking--learning representations, connections, and generalizations in the elementary school grades. They began paying attention to students' explicit remarks about regularities in the number system or what students imply by their…

Discusses mastery goals and developmental levels of students aged 3-7 for learning numbers in informal situations. (KHR)

Describes the kinds of computational abilities achieved by a class of 4th grade students who were part of a research program for teaching rational numbers. In this program, students build on intuitive understandings of percents and proportions for the development of overall understanding of the number system and are encouraged to invent their own…

This article reports on the use of a unique number system to facilitate teachers' understanding of the concepts of place value. Teachers' mastery of base-ten may hinder their recognition of the difficulties students have with place value, so the authors created a number system that used five symbols to represent values. Using this system, teachers…

Describes a multicultural enrichment project for 4th graders that highlights number systems and computation algorithms of various cultures. Discusses student responses and reactions. (KHR)

Describes the construction of a children's calendar for use in school, including development of time concepts, devising event-recording systems, daily and weekly schedules of events, multiple-week schedules of events, and a day-date calendar. (MKR)