LeFevre – learning to count

One of the most important things that children learn roughly between about 2 and 4 is how to count. And we can think about counting in two ways. We can think about verbal counting or what’s sometimes called rote counting. And that’s just learning the string, the verbal string of numbers starting at 1 and going up as high as possible. And it’s not just about memorizing those, although, that’s what they do first. I’m sure we’ve all heard young children go “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” and they don’t really break it down into words. But eventually, they start counting in a more deliberate way. So verbal counting is one aspect of counting that’s important. But children also have to learn how to count objects.  

And so if I show you a group of four toys and say to you, “How many toys are there?”, you need to learn a process for determining how many. Pointing to each toy, saying the verbal label, which is why you need to know what the count sequence is. And then understanding that when you’ve pointed to all of them and said a word, that the last word that you say is the quantity of the set. And that’s referred to as cardinality. So, both cardinality knowledge and verbal counting are often referred to as counting but they’re actually two quite different separate kinds of knowledge that children need to learn.