Teachers can simultaneously use hundred charts to help students learn about number patterns and to assess students' understanding of counting patterns. Using a calculator and a hundred chart enables the students to see the same pattern in two different formats. Two central themes of algebraic thinking are appropriate for young students. As students generalize from observations about number and operations, they are forming the basis of algebraic thinking. Similarly, when students decompose numbers in order to compute, they often use the associative property for the computation.
Students often discover and make generalizations about other properties.
Although it is not necessary to introduce vocabulary such as commutativity or associativity, teachers must be aware of the algebraic properties used by students at this age. They should build students' understanding of the importance of their observations about mathematical situations and challenge them to investigate whether specific observations and conjectures hold for all cases. Teachers should take advantage of their observations of students, as illustrated in this story drawn from an experience in a kindergarten class. The teacher had prepared two groups of cards for her students. In the first group, the number on the front and back of each card differed by 1.