Virtual Number Talks

Virtual Number Talks
Many teachers have asked how to conduct Number Talks virtually. I have a few suggestions that can help. Number Talks is as a very basic description, having conversations and discussions with students each day for about 10-15 minutes to build number sense. 
When I taught Kindergarten I made videos that were shared at professional development sessions about using rekenreks and subitizing dot cards to build numbers sense. 
Each day I would bring students to the carpet and pass out rekenreks for them to use during number talks. 

I have a couple of suggestions for if you are trying to use rekenreks during number talks. If you already have these in your classroom you can make packets or baggies and place them at the school for parents to pick up. We've done this for various things this school year. 

If you do not have rekenreks, but would like a set of rekenreks you can create a donorschoose project to get them. You can find more directions on how to create a donorschoose project at my previous blog post here.

Lastly, you could create these for your students using cardstock and pony beads or give the materials to students to create. (Using the pick up method from the front of the school) We put crates in the front of the school with teacher names on the crates and parents come and pick up baggies or packets of materials from these crates. 

Lastly, students can use this digital set of rekenreks during number talks. 

This set of Digital Rekenrek Number Talk Slides includes one slide that has a completely blank rekenrek with red/white circles (beads) that students can drag to place on the rekenrek to show their thinking. 

You can use any of these rekenrek ideas with these task cards during number talks each day.

These task cards give you prompts of what to have students show on their rekenreks and can guide your instruction during number talks each day.

Subitizing Dot Cards are also extremely useful during number talks and these task cards can be shown over a zoom or google meet and you can have students give a thumbs up once they have the amount shown on the dot card and then call on students to explain how many dots they see and how they know it is that many dots. Some students will explain their thinking by saying they counted 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. while some students will say I see 2 on that side and 4 over there and I know 2 and 4 is 6, or they may say I see 4 and then 2 more is 5, 6. 

Number talks is all about building number sense and all of those responses are correct. Students that count one by one will start to learn from others during number talks over time and it's an excellent way for you as a teacher to understand how your students see and understand numbers. 

I also have a digital version that can be used as an activity for students to complete. There are dots that they can drag and place on the google slide to show the number at the top.

All of these NUMBER TALK resources can be found in this BUNDLE for amazing savings.