Number Power: A Cooperative Approach to Mathematics and Social Development

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.\nBased 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.\nIn Unit 1, students group and count, explore number patterns, and collect and analyze data. In Unit 2, students investigate place value concepts as they group and count by tens and hundreds. Unit 3 provides opportunities for students to compute informally and to explore the relationships between operations. All three units develop students' cooperative skills and abilitiesto make group decisions.