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Are you looking for tools to help your learners gain an understanding of number sense? If you are looking for activities to help students understand the relationship between numbers, see patterns and gain fluency with numbers and number relationships you’ve come to the right place.

One of the things I notice teaching 5th grade math is that my stronger students really understand place value and see the patterns and relationships between numbers. They can skip count, see ‘tens’ in a number and compare numbers very seamlessly without a lot of time or thought. These skills can be achieved through various different teaching practices and my favorite way to instill such concepts is through games.

Today I want to show you Prove It! Number Sense Game. This game is targeted for children in grades K-2. However
I’d consider using for up to 5th grade if you have students severely struggling with counting and number sense with numbers up to 100. My younger students I’ve used it with have loved it and become really competitive trying to prove their number, which in turn greatly improves their number sense.

“Prove It” supports teaching the following CCSS:

1.NBT.1: Count to 120, starting at any number less than 120. In this range, read and write and represent a number of objects with a written numeral.

1.NBT.5: Given a two-digit number, mentally find 10 more or 10 less than the number, without having to count; explain reasoning used.

In this game students are given a card with one 100 squares similar to a 100s grid. Students must prove the number belongs there. They can fill in all 100 numbers or even better use count by’s (skip counting) to show the number belongs.

After playing this game a few times my students were noticeably better at seeing patterns within numbers to 100, skip counting, counting forward and backward and understanding the concepts of less than and greater than. Ask students to explain their thinking to help them see even more concretely the patterns and concepts they are using to prove their number. For example on the example card above a student may say “I proved that 55 belongs there by first counting from on to five. Once I knew where 5 went, I was able to use a skip counting pattern and counted by 10’s from 5 to 55. I could have also counted by 5’s to 55, but that would have taken me a little longer.”

Grab Prove It! Number Sense here from my TpT Store. Or get some graph paper and make your own quick version and put into page sleeves for students to practice with. Thanks for stopping by! If you decide to try out this game or any of my others, I’d love to know what you think. If this was helpful, please leave a comment below.