THE COUNTING GAME

Make learning to count a game with The Counting Game. This is a great way to practice math at home. The basics for this math at home game are simple enough–count everything!

Level One Counting

My little Henry loves counting the stairs as we go up or the number of crackers he is eating. He doesn’t necessarily count the correct number though since he is still at level one.

Beginning number sense involves rote counting, or counting numbers in the correct order. In the beginning stages of number sense, your child might not associate “one” with one item. It will look like they are pretending to count or kind of point around at things and say the numbers in the correct order.

Simply model counting items and encourage as much as you can when you see your little one counting anything. I mean really celebrate them!! The more you associate math with positive emotions, the more your child will want to learn.

Counting Ideas

You can practice counting…

• Steps as you go up or down
• Steps as you walk to or from the car
• Stuffed animals they are playing with
• The books on a shelf
• Toys as you hand them to your child in the bath
• The number of food items on their plate
• Blocks or Legos as you stack them (Mr. Dave would like for me to tell you that I know the plural of Lego is Lego, but it just doesn’t sound right)
• The number of cars you see outside
• Trees you see on a walk

Level Two Counting

The next level would be to associate the numbers in a one-to-one sense. For example, pointing to one object, saying, “one,” pointing to the next, saying, “two,” and so on.

You can use any of the items listed above to practice one-to-one counting to improve your child’s number sense. You may also want to pick specific items that look alike and you have many of such as blocks or crayons or books.

Level Three Counting

Level three is the level of cardinality, or understanding that the last item that was counted is the total number of items. Prompts for this game would be, “how many of _____ do you have?”

Obviously this is level three and the most challenging of all the levels in this post. But once your kiddo has mastered levels one and two, you might as well move onto level three.

Nerdy Math Facts

Technically number sense begins with two areas that seem more advanced than the level one game (to me). According to the GFletchy Number Sense Trajectory, the first step in number sense is subitizing. This means your child can visually recognize the number of items in front of them if they are below five. The second step is comparing numbers which to me, is really surprising that this comes before just counting a set of items.

Happy counting!