Flexibility and Conceptual Thinking Are Required When Working with Numbers
We seek to discern patterns in the cosmos and comprehend its rhythms. But when children enter school and are exposed to a dry set of procedures they believe they just have to accept and memorize, the delight and curiosity that young children have with mathematics are swiftly replaced by dread and hatred.
Students who view arithmetic as a series of quick questions are unable to recognize the importance of their own personal development and education. They believe that arithmetic is a predetermined set of techniques that they either understand or they don’t. However, students realize that their job is thinking, sense-making, and maturing when they view math as a vast field of unsolved riddles in which they might traverse, asking questions and considering relationships. Students that have a mathematical mentality perceive mathematics as a collection of concepts and relationships, with their job being to consider the concepts and make sense of them.
How therefore can we encourage kids to adopt a mathematical mentality and encourage them to approach math with intuition and sense-making? The work is simple before kids start school. It entails encouraging kids to engage with puzzles, shapes, and numbers while considering their connections.
Students that have a mathematical perspective view comprehension and sense-making as their roles in the process of learning mathematics. Number sense, however, is a mathematical mindset that is centered on making meaning of numbers and quantities, and it results from a profound grasp of mathematics.