Counting Principles and Learning for Children

A. Counting Principles

Many students begin school with little to no experience with numbers. Unfortunately, because of this, many students have trouble learning how to count. To help with this there are several things that can be used to help students understand these concepts. These include the counting rules of one-to-one correspondence, stable order rule, order irrelevance rule, and cardinality rules. By the time a student completes kindergarten and begins first grade we as teachers hope that they have the prerequisite knowledge of being able to count to 10. To get them to count up to 15 I will need to build on the skills they have already. I will first begin with one-to-one correspondence to make sure that they understand that each object has a number. To do this I will use little candies that they will place in a straight line. I will do the same thing up on the board by writing the numbers one through 15. I will take pictures of the same candy and count out with them putting one picture under each number. As I do this on the board they will do the same thing at their desks by counting each candy by touching it as they count. Next, I will need to make sure that students understand the stable order rule. According to our book the stable order rule looks like a number – name list that is used in a fixed order every time a group of objects is counted. So when a student counts one, two, three, four,… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they are following the rules of stable order. However, when a student is unable to get their numbers in the correct order for example, they say one, two, ten, seven, five, and so on there are two options the teacher can use. These are reteaching or having the students listen to other students count c...

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... do to adapt the curriculum in order to help them learn. For ELL students I would allow them to count in their home language if they knew it. For students who have learning disabilities, however, they might need one-on-one assistance to help them with counting. In the beginning, I will more than likely guide them myself in order for them to learn one-to-one correspondence. How I would do this would be determined by their level of ability, if they were to count three for one I would more than likely do hand over hand counting. To do this you would take their hand and have them point to each object saying the number with them. As students get better with this I could have the more advanced kids scaffold their learning. To teach this way there would need to be an IEP goal that would be determined by the IEP team, so whatever is written in the IEP is how I would teach.