Time: 15-20 minutes a day
The following series of whole number activities allows you to check how fluent your students are with reading and writing numbers to one million, and gives students lots of practice in reading numbers and in working with place value. It also shows the value of review and over-learning; students will notice as it gets easy to answer questions similar to the ones that were difficult the week before. Students should find most of these questions easy, because they are doing many examples of similar questions until it seems easy. If every question is hard, they will be reluctant to go to the board. Every day only a few questions should present some challenge. You can tailor the questions to suit your students, backing up a step when they are having difficulty, and asking them to explain their thinking on questions they are finding easy to do.
When students can give a correct response quickly and easily, that is the time to ask them to explain their thinking, since usually the skill of talking about math lags behind the skill of doing math. So while some students are finding a particular exercise challenging to do, others, who find it easy to do, can practice the thing that is challenging to them, that is, explaining their thinking.
When students are familiar with the tasks, ask for a volunteer to "be the teacher" and read the instructions for other students to follow. The challenge of checking that student responses are correct, while running the group process of reading answers and noticing patterns, will be an interesting math experience for some students whose skills in doing the math are more advanced than most of the group.
Each day, ask students to go the board to read and write some numbers which you will call out. Encourage them to look around at other students’ work, stand beside someone who is good at math, get a long piece of chalk, and so on. They should do whatever they need to be comfortable at the board. Especially, make sure there is an eraser between every pair of students. If a student has to ask for an eraser, he calls attention to his error. We want him to take a risk, so make sure he can quickly and quietly erase his answer if it is wrong.