Counting Crew
Count them, name the next number, and find who is 4th in line.
For grown-ups
- How long: 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
- When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
- Not timed: thinking time is the point of a book. Let silences run.
- Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.
What this practises
Counting to 20, saying how many, naming what comes next, and finding a position in a line.
Counting, cardinality and ordinality are separate skills that develop separately — a child who can recite "one two three" may still not know that the last word said is how many there are. This book keeps all four apart: count a set, name the next number, produce a set of a given size, and find a position in a line.
- The underlying idea
- Counting, cardinality and ordinality are separable skills that develop separately.
- Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics
- Kindergarten Unit 2: Numbers 1–10 · Kindergarten Unit 6: Numbers 0–20
- Sources
- Illustrative Mathematics / Kendall Hunt (2024) · What Works Clearinghouse (2023) · Nelson et al. (2019) · Geary (2011) all references →
Related measured skill: ALPACA · Early number. What this means