Joyful Learning in the Early Years: Facilitating Math Talks with Young Children

Math
talks are a great way to engage children in open-ended explorations
that invite them to think critically and creatively about a concept. Math talks are like number talks, yet include any area of math that an educator would like children to explore. An
effective math prompt to facilitate a rich math discussion will be
layered; it should be open-ended with multiple entry points for
engagement. Even children as young as kindergarten are capable of
participating in complex math conversations. In our classroom I aim to
invite children into a math talk at least once a day; I sometimes use
the numerical date on our morning message as the spark for exploration.
Other times an interesting photo or collection of loose parts will be
engaging and incite children into further exploration. I try to vary the
invitations I provide in order to diversify the math we discuss and to
reach as many learning interests as possible.

In
our program we have a morning circle time. This circle is our first
whole group gathering time for the day and helps set a positive
atmosphere in our classroom. It is also a time to celebrate being
together, and share news from our homes. We often use it as an
opportunity to read a story and discuss any new and exciting activities
or additions to our classroom space about which the children should know
in order to be successful for the day.

When
I first started teaching kindergarten many years ago it was expected
that the morning circle would begin with ‘calendar time’ where children
would put a sticky number on a large grid to depict the day and there
would be an extensive discussion about the calendar (e.g., day of the
week, month, year). However over the years I realized that this was a
very teacher-directed task and not as meaningful a use of our time.
After reading Sherry Parrish’s work on number talks I was inspired to
use our morning message as an anchor for math talks. Wanting to still
introduce the date to students, the numerical representation of the date
became the foundation for our number talks most days. Sometimes I would
use other prompts depending on the events and interests emerging in our
classroom. If you would like to read more about number talks in
kindergarten, you can access an article I wrote for the Journal of
Teaching and Learning here: Joyful Number Talks in Kindergarten.

Over
the years I have shared my math talks on social media and have been asked
repeatedly to create a guide to support educators who wish to engage their
students in math talks. This inspired my collection of monthly math talk books. Each book contain 25 prompts to engage children in regular conversations in the classroom. The prompts do not need to be followed in order. In order to help educators I have also created free downloadable PDFs that can be printed and used with students.

Click on the book’s image to be linked to where it can be purchased.

Click on the printable to be linked to where it can be printed.