My friend Jenn (@jennleachteach), a Kindergarten teacher in my building, sent me this picture from her number talk yesterday with her students. I could see how the students counted by ones and some by twos by her circling, but I was confused by “x” through the middle dot so I asked her to explain it to me today and I had to share…

The blue circles are by the student who counted them all by 2s, which is clear, however the red circles and numbers are by another student who blew our minds a bit….. The student came to the board, circled the top two left dots, the third top and middle right dot, re-circled the middle right dot with the bottom right, and then the two bottom left dots. If that was hard to follow, the odd part was he didn’t use the middle dot and said that he just “moved it over” in his head.  When asked to explain further, he labeled the dots by number and wrote the equation. He put a one in each to show that it made two in each circle and the put a “2” in the right dot because he had moved the middle dot on top of it and double counted it as two.

I love when she shares her Kindergarten class number talks with me, so MUCH FUN!

-Kristin