Kindergarten Mathematics Exploration Activities for Building Number Sense

Includes 8 activities with teacher guides designed to be used regularly and repeatedly to support students in building number sense related to counting and cardinality and algebraic thinking.

Concepts

• Counting and Cardinality
• Comparing Quantities
• Composing and Decomposing a Quantity

Students

• Count items in sets and record the numbers to represent those quantities
• Compare sets using an understanding of quantity
• Recognize numbers in print and create sets of items to represent those numbers
• Compose a quantity from two smaller quantities (seeing the whole made from its parts)
• Decompose a quantity into two smaller quantities (seeing the parts inside the whole)
• Record numbers and addition equations to represent the part-part-whole relationship

Each teacher-guide includes:

• Activity to help students build number sense (blackline masters of directions, student recording sheets, and mapping papers provided)
• Essential Understandings of the mathematical foci of the activity and aligned standards
• Questioning strategies, specific to essential understandings, to press for student thinking and reasoning about the mathematics