When you ask your student, "what did you do in class today?" You may be hearing, counting. That's right, our roadrunners are working hard at becoming expert learners through counting collections.

Counting Collections creates an opportunity for children to work on many rich math content ideas, namely ideas about counting, quantity, and place value. These complex ideas are developed over time through many opportunities to count. As adults who count with ease, it can be hard to recall all of the component skills involved in learning to count and making sense of quantity. Some of the important concepts of number that children develop include:

● Number names: What do I say?

● Order of numbers: What order do the number names go in?

● Name symbol relation: How do I write that number?

● One to one correspondence: Saying one number name for each object counted

● Cardinality: The last number said is the total amount of objects.

● Relative size: Which is bigger?

● Base ten structure: How are these numbers related? How can I group objects to count and record more efficiently?

● Representations: How do I communicate my ideas in words, numbers, and drawings?

One goal of using Counting Collections is supporting students to count in increasingly efficient ways. As students engage in the activity throughout the year and across grade levels, they begin to utilize concepts of operation to more efficiently count collections. Some concepts of operation children may work on in this activity include:

● Forming equal sized groups of objects, early ideas in multiplication

● Skip counting or using repeated addition to add groups of objects

● Grouping and skip counting by increasingly larger numbers

● Organizing objects into arrays

● Answering questions like: How many groups? and How many objects in each group? as a form of early division

In addition to these important content ideas, Counting Collections also allows

young children to develop mathematical practices like reasoning abstractly and

quantitatively, making use of structure and modeling with mathematics.

Utilizing counting, children model real world situations to

understand “How many are there?,” construct a mathematical model, and represent quantity.

This is a high leverage activity that can easily transfer to home learning through play and counting. So grab a bag of beans, and see how much reasoning your student has as they organize their count.

© 2015 University of Washington.

Pictures provided by Mrs. Hughes' second grade students.

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