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The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) has identified number and operations as a strand in its Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. In grades pre-K through 12, instructional programs should enable all students to do the following:
• | Understand numbers, ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems |
• | Understand the meaning of operations and how they relate to one another |
• | Compute fluently and make reasonable estimates |
In grades 3-5, students are expected to do the following:
• | Describe classes of numbers according to characteristics such as the nature of their factors |
• | Develop understanding of fractions as parts of unit wholes, as parts of a collection, as locations on number lines, and as divisions of whole numbers |
• | Develop and use strategies to estimate the results of whole-number computations and to judge the reasonableness of such results |
"Throughout their study of numbers, students in grades 3-5 should identify classes of numbers and examine their properties. For example, integers that are divisible by 2 are called even numbers, and numbers that are produced by multiplying a number by itself are called square numbers. Students should recognize that different types of numbers have particular characteristics; for example, square numbers have an odd number of factors, and prime numbers have only two factors" (NCTM, 2000, p. 151).
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