counting numbers

Counting

Counting is a part of young children’s daily life. They love to count everything from the stairs they climb to the crackers they eat. But what is counting? What is there to be understood about counting? Numbers and counting seem simple, but it is really quite complex. By developing a sophisticated sense of what counting is and what kind of counting we ought to emphasize in teaching, parents and teachers can better assist children with the development of counting skills and mathematical thinking.

© Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative. Reprinted from Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know (2014), Pearson Education.

Big Ideas

● Counting has rules that apply to any collection.
● Counting can be used to find out “how many” is in a collection.

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Browse our favorite children’s books that explore Counting.

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8 Counting Books For School and Home That Tackle Big Ideas

To encourage and develop children’s counting knowledge, here are eight books (with an accompanying download) that are common to preschool classrooms.

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Counting Collections Builds Strong Counting Knowledge

There are all kinds of things to count in pre-k to second grade classrooms. Counting Collections is an activity that develops the Big Ideas of counting, number sense, and concepts such as cardinality, one-to-one correspondence, and unitizing.

one to one correspondence

One-to-One Correspondence with Child 15

A child counts an organized collection of bears. Children often sort collections into groups by color. Here, a preschooler assumes he has equal groups until he counts them.

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Movement Counts

Students roll a die and mimic animal movements to connect counting words, visual number arrangements, and actions. Movement can be a powerful way for children to internalize one-to-one correspondence, the understanding that each object in a set must be counted once and only once.

3 “Mathical” Books for More Advanced Counting

Along with being “mathical” award winners, these books provide compelling contexts that help primary grade children understand why more advanced counting is useful and that there are different ways to efficiently do the thing we call counting. Numbers in the primary grades can be flexible, and how children count is a reflection of that.

Browse all that match this in our Idea Library.

Big Ideas of Early Mathematics:

What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know

The Big Ideas that convey the core concepts of mathematics are at the heart of this book that gives early childhood educators the skills they need to organize for mathematics teaching and learning during the early years.
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