I updated, made some changes to, this very effective way of getting high numbers of repetitions on the numbers. You will need to have the numbers and colors poster from Teachers Discovery here in order to do this:
1. Get an envelope. If you have a turban, wear it. If you want, have the kids find some entry music for you as you make your way onto the “stage” as Johnny Carson did when doing his Carnac act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76wzA2A2T1Q
2. Ask the students to get with an elbow partner and write down on a sticky note or some piece of paper their favorite color, favorite number, or birthday (guessing their birthdays causes an immediate clamor that you guess their birthday first. They just love this and when that happens they are totally unaware of the input. This is one of the most powerful CI strategies I have ever used.)
3. A detail with numbers: limit numbers to within a range of 1-25, 26-50 (25 at a time) and when you feel your students have mastered a range, go up the next one.
4. There are a few tricks to guessing the birthdays, which are hard to guess when you have a 1/365 chance of guessing it. So do the following:
5. Using the Teachers Discover color/number chart, first walk over to the chart and run your hand over the red, orange or yellow range and look in the kid’s face for clues.
6. Put your hand on each row as if to sk, “Is it in this (red, orange, yellow) row?” At this point you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting the right color correct. If for example the birthday you are trying to guess is on the 4th of some month, you now know that it is going to be from the 1st to the 10th or in those other ranges.
7. Once you get the number guessed, amidst plenty of reps, walk over to the board where are written the seasons and the months in quadrants on the board.
8. First, ask if the month of the kid’s birthday is in the spring, summer, fall or winter. Hover your hand over that quadrant. At this point their focus is all on meaning – entirely. Because it’s about them.
9. Hold the envelope up to your head like Johnny Carson. This is optional but it increases their focus on meaning even more. Look around the room. Play up the moment. Smile. Then with fanfare, all in the TL, guess the color or birthday or number. They love it so much when you are wrong! Meanwhile you are piling up lots of reps.
10. Hire a kid to write down on the board the birthdays once you guess them, under the month. Kids love to tally things on boards as we all know. And they love seeing their names on the board, and they will almost pull their arms out of their shoulders trying to be the next one to have their birthday guessed.
11. You will be surprised that with this clever paring down process starting at the number row and progressing to the season and then to the month, it appears to the kids that you guessed it pretty fast. Use your intuition as well. I think of what a kid’s astrological sign might be because I have a basic enough understanding of astrology enough to at least try it. Usually I’m wrong but it’s fun for me as well.