Back in 2013, a 7th grade student taught me a valuable lesson. I was hired to a new district and school a few days before the school year began. One of the many things I had on my long to-do list was to make my own privacy test dividers so I grabbed a box of 100 manilla file folders from the office to make the cheap-man's version.

Emmanuel (a 7th grader) knew I was new to the school and gave me a run-for-my-money on the first day of school. We had a good chat in class and he stopped by after school to see if I needed help. That was thoughtful of him... maybe he felt bad for his behavior in class.

Check out the video to see how our conversation went when I asked him to help me make 40 test dividers. He taught me an extremely valuable lesson about number sense. At the end of the video, I also share my 3 favorite number sense exercises to do at the beginning of the year.

Emmanuel is a constant reminder why it's important to start the year with students participating in number sense exercises so we can get a benchmark gauge of their number sense. It's students like Emmanuel that feed my passion for helping students develop their number sense. I'm sure you have a similar Emmanuel story and I hope you share it with us in the comments in the YouTube video.

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