Today's Number

Routine: Students generate a variety of representations of the number or function, including drawings, equations, and examples. Generating and sharing these representations allows students to grow in the ways they think about numbers and operations. Students may first create a list individually or in small groups. Working in small groups creates a level of confidence that will encourage students to more willingly share their representations.

Today's Number is one of the seven high-yield routines discussed in the book by Ann McCoy, Joann Barnett & Emily Combs and published by NCTM. High-Yield Routines promote critical thinking, make connections and/or create discussion with the goal of getting all your students talking about math from the minute they walk into the classroom. The goal of the high-yield routines is to provide all of your students with an entry point to the discussion, problem & solution.

Today's number helps students expand their thinking about any given number in relation to different situations, scenarios, and other quantities. The teacher selects today’s number. This could be the number of days in school, the number of days left in the school year or a random number within the scope of your curriculum. Then the teacher asks a variety of questions about the number.

Examples of questions include:

• When is (today's number) big? Small?
• Make (today's number) using three addends.
• What is (today's number) relationship to your age?
• How many groups of 10 are in (today's number)?

For the questions above and more, view the Question Bank. You can use the additional questions to print on card stock or write on index cards or popsicle sticks.

In the attached video example, the questions are placed on large popsicle sticks and pulled randomly from a cup. This routine comes from the book Number Sense Routines by Jessica Shumway.