Photo Chat about Quantities Puts the Focus on Units

Twelve doughnuts or one dozen? How Many of What photo chats invite children to talk about how many of what they see. A quantity is expressed as a number and its unit (e.g., 3 chocolate doughnuts or 1 doughnut with sprinkles).

In this video, preschoolers share the quantities they see when looking at a photo of a box of doughnuts. There are many ways to answer the question, how many of what?, depending on the unit. 

Mathematical thinking is strongly connected to oral language development; therefore, we encourage conversations about not only how many children see but how they see it. Offering children an image with many smaller quantities within a larger total offers all children a point of entry. The quantities in the photo are composed so that children can practice looking for and making use of structure to determine how many of what.