Counting Collections

This week I introduced Counting Collections in Math. Students are partnered up and given a collection of objects to count together. Sounds simple, right? Important skills and understandings are developed through opportunities to count. As adults, we count with ease and it's hard to recall the complexity of skills involved in learning to count and making sense of quantity. Children develop important number concepts including:

• naming numbers
• sequencing numbers - ordering number names
• name and symbol relation - writing numbers 
• one to one correspondence - saying a number name for each object
• cardinality - the last number said is the total
• relative size - which is bigger
• base ten structure - how numbers go together (written and verbal)
• efficiency and accuracy - grouping objects to count and record efficiently
• representations - communicating ideas in words, numbers and drawings  

We kicked off with a read aloud by Lizann Flatt called Counting on Fall. If poses the question, what if animals and plants knew math like you? Would leaves fall in patterns? Would squirrels gather nuts in groups of five? Would birds always fly in flocks of ten? This got them thinking about strategies they use to count and what their eyes recognize at a glance. They were eager to start counting.

Having the students work in partners encourages dialogue and problem solving through the sharing of ideas and strategies. Teamwork allows students to learn from each other, build confidence and promotes risk taking. Here are the collections they could choose from. All of the collections, to start, were between 20 and 60. We will build up to larger collections in the hundreds over time.

They quickly got to work and it was easy to observe which strategies they were most comfortable with and what posed challenges.

This group arranged the clothes pins into groups of ten and counted 10, 20 and then counted on 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. When asked to count a different way they grouped them into fives.

This group went for pairs and skip counted by twos to 24. Skip counting to ten was easy, but was harder to 20 and more difficult after 20.

Another group opted for pairs to count the pompoms although they had to start over a couple of times because they lost count and couldn't remember which ones they had counted.

The buttons were grouped into rows of ten although they were tricky to count because they were so close together. 

This group also counted the pencil crayons by ones and chose to organize them in a circle to keep track.

The mini pompoms were counted first by ones, but that wasn't working well so they switched to groups of ten. There was one left over.

We reviewed and shared the strategies they used as a group and the following day talked about which strategies worked well and why. They determined that the larger the collection, the larger the groups. The smaller the collection, the smaller the groups. They also decided that you could start by twos and then regroup them into piles of ten from there. The second day, new partners and new collections provided new challenges. 

Next week, we'll add representation, having the students communicate and record their counting using words, numbers and drawings.