Number of the Day, or NOD as I will refer to it, is a constructivist approach to help students think about math and numbers in different ways as well as a way to apply and review vocabulary and skills that have been previously taught or to front load upcoming skills. Ideally NOD sessions happen 2 to 3 times per week with each one lasting approximately 15 minutes.
The set up for NOD is super easy! You will need a notebook for each student and any tools that you want them to use as you begin. The tools can be number lines, hundreds charts, divisibility rules chart, conversion chart, etc. You can add to these as you introduce new concepts or skills. You will also need chart paper or another writing surface and several color markers. I prefer to use chart paper so that I can refer back to our work from previous days, but if you have a document camera, a folder with your NOD sheets would work as well.
The best way I have found to organize the student's notebook is to use half of the notebook for notes from mini-lessons and tools (the students glue or tape them to the pages) and the second half for where they will do their work for NOD. In kindergarten and first grade where the tools are limited pretty much to a number line and a hundred's chart, I have found that cutting envelopes in half and taping them to the front cover of the notebook provides a handy pocket to keep those two tools. Therefore, giving our littlest mathematicians the ability to use their tools while they work without having to flip pages.
NOD is student led. This means the teacher chooses the number, but the students decide what to do to arrive at that number with no preconceived ideas. This allows the lowest students to use some basic skills while the more capable students use more advanced ones. The minute that you try to make students use a particular skill you loose what NOD is meant to be. The students will realize you have an agenda and unfortunately you will never see the growth you could have otherwise.
NOD is a way to spiral curriculum. In one session, you may see students use money, fractions, shapes, variables, etc. because they know that ANYTHING goes! One common complaint that I hear from teachers is that the students "keep doing the same thing!" This usually happens because unknowingly teachers only encourage teachers to use grade level skills. I have found NOD works best when students are encouraged to use skills below as well as above their grade level.
NOD is always a positive experience. This is a time where students should feel like no matter what they try, it is okay! There are no put-downs from other students and the teacher never says, "That's wrong." Instead mistakes are identified by students and seen as learning opportunities where the class as a whole works to correct the error.
The expectations to a NOD session are simple!
• Students are expected to try a variety of strategies in their notebook to arrive at the number given.
• Students are expected to work independently for the entire work-time.
• Students should be willing to share what they try.
• Students should be willing to participate and listen attentively.
Maintaining those expectations make the time go quickly and allows for maximum amount of learning to happen.
What are the steps to a NOD session?
- Once students have their materials out, the teacher tells the students the number for that day.
- The students then spend 5 minutes working to come up with a multitude of ways to arrive at the number while the teacher walks around doing mini-conferences. The teacher at this time is looking to see what skills are being used by the students. She will pause to briefly ask questions of students that help them think about what they are doing or to guide them to correct or stretch their thinking or try something new. It is always the student's choice what to do with your discussion. This is also a good time to let student's know that something they have tried is "really cool" or "worth sharing". This usually is enough to get students to raise their hands during debriefing time.
- Debriefing takes place for about 10 minutes. This sharing time is when students volunteer the strategies that they have done and the teacher writes it down. The teacher should never call on a particular student to share a particular strategy. Once again, this makes students feel like the teacher has an agenda and changes what NOD should be - constructivist. Students are usually not allowed to do the writing so that the teacher can facilitate the thinking and show the strategy or skill how she thinks students need to see it. The amount of strategies that can be shared during that time will vary on what the skills involved are and how much work you do with it.
Here is a video of what a debrief can look like:
Also, here are some pictures of the charts created during NOD at different grade levels. The first one shows the work of first graders at the beginning of the 2nd quarter.
These students are doing some basic work with first grade skills as seen by the math mountain, fact family, and subtraction equation. However, they are also experimenting with skip counting which is a beginning for multiplication (which I actually did eventually do with them) and something that was the beginnings of perimeter.
The next picture is the work of a third grade class at the end of 1st semester.
Some students are still more comfortable with addition than multiplication, so we make sure that we talk about "other ways" to write equations to encourage more use of multiplication. Order of operations has come into play because of how students want to use the numbers and operations. After this session, we knew that we needed to move students into more division and so we provided a divisibility rules chart and chose numbers that facilitated its use.
The work of a fourth grade class shows how this can happen.
Students used their divisibility rules to come up with a fact family. While fact families is a 1st/2nd grade skill, it comes in handy to have students feel comfortable with the relationship between the two inverse operations. It was interesting that in that scenario, the student chose to use division to start. The work in green shows the crossover between the work that we had done in the classroom with mental math with stringing and NOD.
The last chart is the work of a 5th grade class.
This class had gotten stuck on word problems - wanting to do one after another. While we found it beneficial to do them and a good way to reinforce the rules we had stablished for problem solving, we had to make a rule that only one could be shared during a NOD session so that there was time to do other skills. The work with the money equation brought to light several misconceptions that caused us to move to decimals for future numbers, but also allowed some work with in/out tables.
One final thought... There is no right or wrong number you can choose. However, NOD will work at its best if numbers are chosen with purpose instead of randomly. This takes a little thought when doing your math lesson plans. All you have to do is think about the work you are seeing your students do during your NOD sessions and what number(s) will address the misconceptions you are seeing or reinforce a concept or skill. And here and there when you are stumped, then you just choose a random one that will challenge your students and lead you down a new path!
