How much? and How many? are fundamental “Big Idea” questions that are so embedded in our everyday life that we often are not conscious that in fact we are doing math. We think of counting the children on the bus at the end of a field trip as a safety issue; or our focus is on balancing storage space and our family’s eating habits when we calculate how many juice boxes, yogurts or cans of soup we want to stock up on during a sale.
© Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative. Reprinted from Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know (2014), Pearson Education.