Understanding of numerosity is central to number sense development. When children gain deeper knowledge of this Big Idea, they know that when number words are used to name “how many,” they describe amount, just as “red” describes color, and “hot” describes temperature.
© Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative. Reprinted from Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know (2014), Pearson Education.
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Regardless of how high a preschooler can rote count, a child’s sense of what those numbers actually mean develops gradually. We call this understanding number sense, and it requires relating numbers to real quantities.
This bingo-like game allows children to think about numbers in different ways. It focuses children on the attribute of quantity of small sets and helps them build a more robust number sense.
Ellen Stoll Walsh’s book Mouse Count can be used in the classroom to cover such broad-ranging topics as data analysis, number sense, and number and operations. Key concepts such as estimation can be explored and investigated.
In Count Me In! by Cynthia Weill we follow a procession of Mexican folk culture while exploring counting and math concepts.
A child compares two small sets of wooden cubes.
A child selects a card with a given number of dots.
A child produces a small set of counters to match a shown quantity.
A student approximates the number of cubes in collections of increasing quantity.
A child estimates the number of cubes in a collection.
A child estimates the number of cubes in a collection.
Children like big numbers! Often before they can say all the numbers from one to one hundred reliably, children understand that one hundred is a lot. They quickly learn that one thousand is even more and one million even more than that.
Angela Giglio Andrews explains a math activity she used in a preschool class. Despite its apparent simplicity, it led to a wide variety of responses from her students.