Number and Number Sense: Virginia Standards of Learning
Students in grades K–3 have a natural curiosity about their world, which leads them to develop a sense of number. Young children are motivated to count everything around them and begin to develop an understanding of the size of numbers (magnitude), multiple ways of thinking about and representing numbers, strategies and words to compare numbers, and an understanding of the effects of simple operations on numbers. Building on their own intuitive mathematical knowledge, they also display a natural need to organize things by sorting, comparing, ordering, and labeling objects in a variety of collections.
Consequently, the focus of instruction in the number and number sense strand is to promote an understanding of counting, classification, whole numbers, place value, fractions, number relationships (“more than,” “less than,” and “equal to”), and the effects of single-step and multistep computations. These learning experiences should allow students to engage actively in a variety of problem solving situations and to model numbers (compose and decompose), using a variety of manipulatives. Additionally, students at this level should have opportunities to observe, to develop an understanding of the relationship they see between numbers, and to develop the skills to communicate these relationships in precise, unambiguous terms. From the Virginia Department of Education
Click here to check out activities for counting and whole numbers, here for number writing, and here for fractions.