Teaching Children to Count Rationally from Ten to Twenty

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Teaching Students to Count Rationally from Ten to Twenty Although most children begin elementary school with some knowledge of numbers from their everyday life experiences, learning numbers and learning to count is a process that must be prioritized for kindergarten and first grade students. The goal of this instruction is for students to become rational counters; a student who can assign a name to a number value in the proper order (Reys, et al., 2012, p. 141). There are four principles that can be taught in order to guide students to become rational counters at an early point in their education, which will form the basis for all other mathematics instruction throughout their educations. These principles are one to one correspondence, the stable order rule, the order irrelevance rule, and the cardinality rule. For the remainder of this essay, steps for teaching these principles as well as examples will be explored, on the basis of teaching ten first graders, who can already rationally count to ten, learn to count rationally to fifteen. Students will be paired for the activities in an attempt to have less advanced students learning from more advanced students. Each pair of students will be given a cup full of 15 rocks from my classroom rock collection and a stack of laminated number cards, containing the numbers 1-15, to work with. The authors of Helping Children Learn Mathematics define one to one correspondence as such: “Each object to be counted must be assigned one and only one number name,” (Reys, et al., 2012, p. 141). To help the students learn this principle I would draw fifteen circles on the board in a straight line and talk to the students about what I am doing as I wrote the numbers 1-15, one under each circle. To tie in the stable-order rule, I would ask the students afterwards if they noticed that I wrote my numbers in a specific order.

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