I met Shanti, an 11-year-old girl, while doing research in Mumbai, India. Shanti lived on the railway platforms with her mom and younger brother. She spent most of her days riding the trains, selling hair clips to customers. Shanti sporadically attended school. Despite living in poverty and no consistent formal education, Shanti had learned ways of working with numbers that showed remarkable mathematical flexibility. I observed Shanti selling one afternoon. Balancing a box on her head filled with brightly colored hairclips, Shanti approached a customer, set the box down next to her, and asked the customer to buy hair clips priced at 5 rupees each. The customer looked through the box and then chose 7 hair clips. Shanti immediately calculated the total cost of the 7 hair clips as 35 rupees. The customer gave her a 50-rupee note; without missing a beat, Shanti said that she only had 10 rupees in change, and asked the customer to buy one more hairclip to make the total 40 rupees. The customer agreed, the money was exchanged, and Shanti lifted the box onto her head and moved on. Shanti had learned strategies for addition and subtraction that were quick, efficient, and resulted is successful sales. However, these mathematical strategies were specific to selling and cannot be generalized. Such broader and more general numeracy skills are taught in school. Unfortunately, when children like Shanti do attend school, they are often viewed as unintelligent because they lack consistent formal schooling. This is a vicious cycle; these children are not given opportunities to learn in school because many teachers view efforts to educate them as a waste of time. However, we know that all children can learn the basic numeracy skills taught in school. How can we improve the quality of numeracy education for young children such as Shanti? - Support teachers in valuing the knowledge children bring to the classroom. Children need to know that they are valued as students, and that their teachers believe they have the capacity to learn. - Support teachers in leveraging this knowledge in instruction. Teachers can make links between mathematics problems solved in the classroom and out-of-school contexts to help children apply the mathematical skills they’ve learned while working. Valuing all children’s contributions in the classroom is a step in the right direction to providing working children with a quality education and improving their basic numeracy skills.