Number Sense

I agreed with Howden (1989) who said that "good intuition about numbers and their relationships develops gradually as a result of exploring numbers, visaulizing them in a variety of contexts"). Evidently, children need to explore with concrete materials to discover number relations and patterns and through their explorations; they make connections and build bigger ideas and understanding. The text emphasized that early number sense demand significant attention in Pre-K and K children so as to establish a solid foundation. It also emphasized that counting is the most impotant tool that young children will first develop which eventually will be reduced as children construct new relaltionships in numbers and build new ideas.

Some of the Number sense activities that are being practised in our preschools are introduced in the book, such as:

i)  Numeral writing and recognition - Children are given sand paper number cards to trace to develop sensorial learning as well as number recognition.

They also learn to count objects according to the number to understand its value.

Children also learn to match numbers to number cards; which is a common math activity in Singapore preschools.

To further reinforce their concept on counting; teacher will allow the children to practise by working on worksheets.

ii) Another number sense activity that our preschools practise is mainly  taught in the K2s : build it in parts. In a typical K2 classroom; a teacher would give connecting cubes to teach children number concept such as 2 and 2, 2 and 5, 5 and 3. Children use different colour cubes for each number and connect the cubes together and thereafter count on to find out the total number of cubes. By counting on; children learn that 2 and 2 will make 4 cubes and so on.

Some activities that are not common or practised in Singapore are: The double Maker which uses the calcuator. Another one is: Add a Unit to Your Number.