What I'm Reading Wednesday: Making Number Talks Matter- Chapter 6

Chapter 6 discusses mental math addition strategies. The authors do discourage the use of addition number talks when you first get started because many older students view addition as "too easy;" however, it is an excellent place to start to build confidence and to provide opportunities for students to build solid mental math skills. 

As in the previous chapters, the authors include ways to use mental math strategies to address operations with decimals and fractions. I found the addition strategies particularly useful and included them in my picture overview of the chapter.

The picture below is a quick overview of how students may articulate how they use each of the strategies, as titled in the text. I chose to use different problems than the ones in the book so that I could apply my own explanations to each strategy.

In the latter part of the chapter, the authors give a detailed explanation of how to develop the strategies above. This section includes a more in-depth description of the strategy, sample problems, and questions to probe when students use each strategy. 

Sound Off! What addition strategies do you use?

Note: In order to honor the authors' work, I will only share my own personal experiences, thoughts, and reflections as related to the book's content. If something really strikes me, I will share a quote from time to time with the appropriate citations. 


Reference: Humphreys, C and Parker, R. (2016). Making Number Talks Matter. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers