Number Talks

Last month, we attended a workshop about "Number Talks".  It was about a  novel way of teaching Math.  I have not tried it with my children, but it definitely sounds promising.    I could not find any free resources related to it.  However, I did find these:

http://www.mathsolutions.com/index.cfm?page=wp18&contentid=1238&crid=98&mcrid=107

The package with a Multimedia CD that costs 65$.  

Here is an example from Chapter 1 from the first link -

49  x 5

The goal of number talk is to help a student approach this problem like this for instance:

50 x 5 and then subtract one group of 5 to arrive at the answer of 245.

I also found a book titled Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computation Strategies, Grades K-5