Student Actions

                                         Teacher Actions

• Develop conceptual understanding as students are actively engaged in a variety of activities such as part-part-whole, dominoes, dice, and card games, tally marks, and place value to make connections using numbers or subitize in a variety of settings.

• Construct and deconstruct groups in a set to connect various meanings and relationships of numbers.  Students will actively participate in number talks and playing games in a variety of settings in which they will discover multiple ways to make a number. Some ways to make 5 are five tally marks, 2 and 3, five cubes, 6-1, five pips on a dice, etc...

• Develop the ability to communicate mathematically by participating in whole group and small group lessons using specific language to communicate and have appropriate peer interactions during games and number talks by agreed upon rules. Students should be able to use the correct vocabulary when discussing tally marks, pips on die, skip count, etc...

• Develop the ability to model, generalize, and draw conclusions while they subitize. Students will explain how they “see” a number of dots or group of items without counting and explain strategies with peers about the numbers they see. 

• Pose purposeful questions to students as teacher circulates among groups. Ask questions such as “How did you know that makes ________?”  How did you see that number?”  “Tell your neighbor how you saw that?” “Did they see it the same way or can they find another way?”

• Teachers should model and demonstrate strategies of how to subitize using a variety of tools such as dot cards, dominoes, and dice. An example of this is a set of dot patterns created on paper plates-the dots can be easily made using daubers or colored circle stickers. Since paper plates are round, they are held up essentially one at a time showing a random orientation each time. Two different colors of dots can used on one plate to begin modeling the idea of subitizing that clearly shows how two numbers come together to create a specific amount.

• Support productive struggle while questioning students about how they see given numbers. During small groups students will demonstrate using daubers on paper plates, student response boards, slates and peer interactions.

• Use appropriate vocabulary such as, pip, die, skip count, tally, and part part whole, while leading conversations about subitizing. Teachers can use anchor charts to illustrate how to “see” numbers when students are subitizing. The ability to subitize can be developed, and uses a student’s pattern recognition skills. Part part whole understanding is used to subitize numbers over four or five.This means a student looking at this pattern doesn’t usually see 7, but instead 1 and 6, or maybe 2 and 5.  

Key Understandings

Misconceptions

• Count using one-to-one correspondence. 

• Subitize, which is being able to quickly recognize numbers without counting.

• Construct and deconstruct groups in a set to connect meaning while developing number sense. 

• Not know the number names and/or guess.

• Not count an item or count twice.

• Not realize that a number names a quantity.