Topic

Assessing the five strands of number sense with intermediate students in grades 3-5 using developmental stages along with the BC Curriculum.

  (Younger, 2024)

I made this infographic on the 5 strands of Number Sense for PME 894 in May but didn’t get it posted to my website until las week.

Format

I intend to utilize my existing webpage or subpage with my existing domain name. My web page will include a series of imbedded YouTube videos defining number sense as well as working through each of the five strands, my intention is for each of these videos to be between 5 and 6 minutes long so it is a “bite sized” pro-d activity. A lot of elementary educators are not confident or even fearful of teaching math, by reducing the videos to shorter time frames focused on a single idea or concept it becomes more accessible.

In addition to the videos I will create a sample assessment for intermediate students in grades 3-5 along with rubrics, individual and whole class scoring sheets and parent information about the assessment. The assessment will be posted as a PDF to my website including all of the pieces needed to conduct the assessment, the student forms, interview questions and number cards.

Rational

Number sense is the foundation of all other learning in mathematics, it is an innate skill that begins developing in infancy and is nurtured and developed thorough focused practice and repeated exposure to number based activities. Number sense is our ability to make sense of quantities and communicate about them and their relationships, as students go through their elementary and middle school years the demands of them, and their number sense increases until the learner has gone from counting out ten objects to working with numbers in the billions and understanding roots and exponents. Number sense being the foundational skill needs to be as purposely taught, nurtured and assessed as students’ phonics skills are. Teachers require a clear understanding of the progression’s students need to go though to master their number sense skills as well an accurate tool to assess student number sense to ensure that students are on the right track and making progress. Having a valid accurate assessment tool for number sense not only allows for progress monitoring with students it also allows schools to determine which students have gaps in their number sense and make a plan to assist them.