Mathematics: Counting!

Today we started our daily math! Every day as a part of our morning routine, we will dedicate 5-10 minutes to math. During our daily math, we only focus on number sense (counting, estimating, more or less, etc.) We will explore other concepts of math such as shapes during other math lessons.

Today we started with something basic- counting objects! In the teacher world, we call this "one-to-one correspondence". This means that a child knows that every time you touch an object, you count it. If there are 3 objects, we count 3. Our oral counting has to match physically touching the object. Today we went over a couple of things:

1. We always start with the number 1!
2. We have to keep track of where we're counting to avoid counting the same object twice. We try to count in a "path", or use something call "tag and drag", where you physically move the object to account for it.
3. The last number we say is how many there are. This is called cardinality. For example, we counted 9 objects all together.... how many are there?

There are a lot of ways to practise this at home! Try counting your toys. Have your child help you set up for dinner... if there are 4 people in our family, how many plates will we need?

It's important that students can 'rote' count (verbally), but we need to move past this and connect it with a quantity. What does 8 really look like? How about 6? Explore this more at home, and we will obviously keep practising in class!