Using Objects to Teach Counting

Hello, I would like to show you one way that I teach counting one-to-one correspondence with the children in my early childhood classroom. To begin with, you need some counters. And, today I have just chosen pinto beans, because we usually have a large amount of those in our classrooms, and they’re easy to come by. So, what I do first is I just count with the children. I say boys and girls, today I am going to count to four. Ready? Watch me, and I go one, two, three, four. Good job boys and girls we counted to four. How many beans are on the table? That’s right, four. And, I pick up those beans and I say let’s count again. And, I get some more, and we count to six. One, two, three, four, five, six. After I’ve counted several different numbers of beans, I will put the children in small groups together with some counters. Whatever counters you have would be great, and I would just call out a number and have the children in the group work together to create that number. After we’re very confident about that, I might get my dots cards out again, and in a center activity or a partner group activity, I would have the children count the dots. Boys and girls, count with me 1, 2, 3, 4. How many dots are on the card? That’s right, there are four dots on the card. And, we would continue practicing until we could count, and point to whatever we’re counting, bears, beans, counters, rocks, twigs, rice whatever. And, they can count it correctly knowing that they only count each item once. And, that’s how I would teach one-to-one counting correspondence with the students in my early childhood classroom.