Tackling the Teens

I reassessed my student this week on number identification and I was pleasantly surprised! Most of them could name all... yes, ALL of the teen numbers! Some of them couldn't identify past 12 when school started.
Now this wouldn't be surprising if I just finished our math unit on teen numbers...but we didn't. We are learning about graphing, greater/fewer/equal, patterning...
The only "teen number" practice has been talking about them during calendar time, our 10 Red Apples poem, and our passwords to leave at the end of the day. I thought I'd share these "tricks" with you today since they are a fun way to get your students brains ready for your teen number unit. (I don't know about you, but if there's a trick for teen numbers - I'll try it!)

10  11 Red Apples 

(I had to change the # of apples in the poem since I wanted to include the # 10. 
The original idea came from the Mailbox magazine)

11 red apples sitting in a tree,

5 for you and 6 for me,

But there's 1 little worm that you can't see.

Where oh where could that little worm be?

Students raise their hands to guess which apple that sneaky worm is hiding behind. It's so simple but they LOVE it! It's great number recognition practice. For students that don't know their teen numbers yet, I'll give them 2 choices when I call on them "Theo, do you think the worm is behind apple # 15 or 18?"

I start by keeping the numbers in order from 10-20 so they can count on to figure out the name of a teen number. (I model this by "thinking out loud": "10, 11, 12...13! I think the worm is behind the 13.") After a few days, I place the apples randomly for a challenge.

Only 4 numbers left! He's a sneaky worm!

End of the day password

I am blessed to have an amazing ET student helping in my classroom this year. (ET = Education Training student. ET students are high school students who want experience assisting in a classroom to see if a career in education is something they'd be interested in.)
Since my ET helps our classroom the last hour of the day, I put her in charge of our exit password. She'll stand by the classroom door. As we file out at the end of the day, she holds up a number card. As each student passes, they say the name of the number to her - their password to leave the classroom. The cards have objects on the back for students to count if they can't identify the number. (I strategically place students that may need to do this in the back of the line when we leave so they don't feel pressure from others waiting behind them.)

Now, when we get to our teen number unit in math we won't have to spend as much time identifying teen numbers. With that under our belt, we can focus on writing and representing teen numbers.

Leave a comment with your favorite "teen tackling tricks"!