Big Ideas of Counting
Learn the big ideas of counting and explore related early learning activities, books, and resources.
Understanding 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.
Copyright: Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative. Reprinted from Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know (2014), Pearson Education.
Counting has rules that apply to any collection
Thanks to TV shows like Sesame Street, many children enter preschool chanting or singing the number names from 1 to 20. Learning to count meaningfully requires both memorizing arbitrary terms or number names (rote counting) and rule-governed counting (rational counting). Rote recitation of the number words is not the same as having a good number sense for what 20, 25, or 100 means. Rational counting means a child’s ability to assign a number to the things that are being counted.
Counting can be used to find out “how many” is in a collection
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.
Explore Resources & Books Related to Counting
Children in a math-rich early childhood environment will have many experiences with counting, including having early learning and preschool counting books that explore the Big Ideas. By focusing book choices so that they illustrate the central concepts, talking about counting can be part of a healthy routine of meaningful activities that help children develop a useful sense of what counting is.
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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