Movement Counts - A Game to Practice Counting Words (Early Math Collaborative at Erikson)

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Students roll a die and mimic animal movements to connect counting words, visual number arrangements, and actions. View more at earlymath.erikson.edu
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.
FOUNDATIONAL MATH TOPIC: 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? What do most children know about counting? What more is there to be learned? Counting seems very 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.
BIG IDEA
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.
BIG IDEA
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.