Math teacher Nancy Ku received a PTSA Mini-Grant in Fall 2016 to attend a math workshop.  She reports:

"I attended the Number Talks Institute with Cathy Humphreys (one of the creators of Number Talks).  I learned strategies for helping my students develop their number sense and use numerical operations flexibly.  Number Talks also reinforce our class culture of thinking about math in different ways and validating students' unique ways of solving problems.   After the workshop, I successfully did Number Talks that helped my students make sense of percentages.  I will continue to use Number Talks to help my students build their understanding of numbers and operations, particularly subtraction as the opposite of addition, and division as the opposite of multiplication.  I believe these understandings are core to students' ability to deeply understand higher levels of mathematics.

At the workshop, I learned to use a cell phone charge bar to represent percentages. It really helped my students make realistic estimates of percentages (e.g. 40% of 2000 students).   In my Geometry classes for 11th and 12th graders, many students did not have a conceptual understanding of percentages, and therefore had difficulty making any estimations.  However, many of them have a better sense now."