For teachers who have had the opportunity to engage in professional development around counting, a three-hour workshop can launch their work on the operations. This workshop engages participants in counting a collection using what they already know to extend to solving addition, subtraction, and division (fair-sharing) problems.
Professional Development: 3 Hours
These guidelines can provide three or more hours on extending counting to operations. It builds on participants’ knowledge of Counting Collections.
Let’s remind teachers about how much they already know about children’s thinking in counting.
- Engage participants in Counting Large Collections (see description here), but adjust the size of the collections to 21 to 40.
Develop an understanding of how teachers can help students use what they already know about counting to solve simple story problems.
- Implement the activity described in Extending Counting to Operations: Getting Started
- Read Supporting Counting to Problem Solving. Pair share and discuss big ideas in the whole group.
Consider how to use counting to solving story problems in your own classroom.
- Engage participants in Getting Started with Counting Collections (see description here). Guide the conversation to focus on how teachers can extend counting to problem solving, encouraging teachers to consider how to add problem solving to their own context.
- Send teachers home with the handout The Mathematics of Operations.