Building number sense is a HUGE focus of first grade. Students must have a solid awareness of how numbers relate to one another (which number is greater or less) as well as how they are ordered (which number comes before, after, between).
One very fun way to help first graders build their number sense is to play War! I first introduced War with our number cards. To warm the kids up I asked them to look through their cards and identify the largest and smallest numbers. Then I asked them to put their cards in order from smallest to largest. After these skills were successfully performed I introduced the War game. Each pair shuffled their cards, face down, and then divided them evenly. Keeping the piles face down each pair counted to three and then turned over their top card at the same time. Whichever person had the card with the greatest value got to keep both cards and add them to the bottom of their pile. If the students turned over cards with the same value (ie 4 and 4), they went to “war” and turned over the next cards at the top of their piles. Again, whichever person had the card with the greatest value got to keep all four cards.
Needless to say the game was a huge hit with our young mathematicians!
To further build our number sense, we have since adapted the game so that the cards with the lowest value win. Each child also made their own dot cards to play with. The dot cards provide students with a concrete visual representation of each number.
