By Kristen Acosta

K-2

Did you ever wonder why Mr. Rogers used “Picture Picture”? He used this visual routine to teach his young audience about how boxes of crayons were made or how macaroni was created. Children rely on their vision to make sense and understand the world around them. Mr. Rogers would use this to his advantage when teaching his audience. 

Pictures and images play an important role in a child’s growing development. Pictures can stir creativity or evoke an emotion. Pictures can start conversations. Pictures can tap into a person’s background knowledge as the image may stir up a memory.  

Using pictures to have a math conversation with students is an easy way to engage students in math and make math accessible to all children. Math isn’t a subject that is purely in a textbook. Math isn’t about algorithms or shortcuts. Math is about seeing patterns and applying what we know to what is seen.

Look at the picture of the flowers. Ask yourself, “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” (Your brain is now making sense of what you are looking at.)

A few things that you might notice:

• Different colored flowers
• Some flowers have a yellow center
• Some flowers have a black center
• There are green stems

 A few things that you might wonder:

• How many flowers are there?
• How many petals are on each flower?
• Are there more yellow centers or more black centers?

My question to my students might be, “how many flowers are there?” The next follow up question, how do you know, is the most important because this will give the teacher an idea of how each student is counting the flowers.  

How might  students count the flowers? They may just do one-to-one correspondence and count the flowers by 1s. Or count by 2s. They may add up the flowers by the centers (yellow center plus black center).  They may put the flowers into groups of 3 or 4 and add them. Challenge your students to find as many different ways to count up the flowers as possible. 

Utilizing pictures in your math lessons is a wonderful way to not only engage your students, but help them develop number sense. You will be amazed at the conversation that will get started because every child will have something to say. Most importantly, you are making math an active subject that takes math out of a textbook and into everyday life.      

For more addition resources:  Edutopia Article Website