Piggies

Number Power is a K-6 program that takes a holistic, developmental view of education and is designed to support both mathematical and social development. The focus of the program is to support and expand students' emerging number sense. As students collaboratively investigate problems, they develop their number sense, mathematical reasoning, communication skills, and ability to work together in fair, caring, and responsible ways.Number Power is based on the assumption that children learn about the world through everyday interaction with their environment and with others. In these units, children's conceptual understanding is developed and enhanced through a combination of hands-on experiences, role playing, problem solving, and reflection on these experiences. Academic and social learning are integrated naturally, rather than developed in isolation from each other. Exploration, questioning, discussion, reasoning, and reflection are all part of this natural learning process.Based on the recommendations of the NCTM Standards, the Number Power lessons are designed to be accessible to all students and meet the needs of students with diverse backgrounds. Each unit fosters the development of several essential concepts and may include additional areas of mathematics such as measurement, geometry, and data analysis.The kindergarten volume has a special format to help teachers engage the interests and meet the developmental needs of this age group. Chants, rhymes, role-playing, or picture books are used in each set of experiences, and students have many opportunities to listen to and help each other, share the work, and make decisions. These experiences also support children'svocabulary development, oral expression, and listening comprehension. In Set One, children investigate number meaning and relationships as they count objects and data, and they use domino patterns to help them visualize a set of objects as a whole. Set Two gives children opportunities to explore the underlying concepts of addition and subtraction and to use manipulatives to explore counting on and counting backwards. Set Three further builds on children's knowledge of whole numbers as they compose and decompose numbers, solve problems, and count objects by twos and by fives. Throughout the units, children are encouraged to recognize how their behavior affects others, to think about the underlying values that guide behavior, and to develop appropriate cooperative skills.