There's More to Counting Than Just Counting

Let’s start at the very beginning: COUNTING! We know that we should teach our children how to count. But there is much more to counting than merely reciting the names of numbers. When your three-year-old can rattle off, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,” what they’re doing is rote counting. This means your child knows the names of numbers, but has little to no understanding of each number’s meaning.

In order to really count—the counting that answers a “how many” question—children also need to develop:

• One-to-one correspondence

• Cardinality

One-to-one correspondence means that a child understands that each number named has a real and concrete meaning: it corresponds to one object in the group. For example, when a child says, “One,” they know that means the first object in the set and can point to that object. “Two” means the second object in the set and they move their finger to the second object. “Three” to the third object and so on.

One way to tell this skill isn’t quite mastered: when a child who doesn’t have one-to-one correspondence is asked to count a group of objects, he or she might skip an object when counting or count a single object more than one time.

Cardinality means that a child understands that the last number named in the counting sequence names the size of the group. For example, if there are 5 pencils and you ask how many, a child counts, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” and then answers, “Five. There are 5 pencils.”

It is important to note that these concepts do not develop in sequential order. Rather, your child will continue developing each of these with progressively larger and larger quantities.