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What’s so hard about counting?

31 December 2009 32 Comments

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Plenty, according to a psychologist Rochel Gelman, “Adults take it for granted because counting is so easy for us. But the truth is that learning how to count things requires a lot more than just memorizing a series of words.” To see what Gelman means, try putting yourself in your child’s shoes by imagining the following: You decide to open a bank account, but instead of the normal warm reception from the manager, you receive this letter:

Dear Customer:

We have recently instituted a complex security system. In order to access your accounts, you will need to commit to memory the following rules. Good luck!

- The Management Team

THE RULES

Step 1: Memorize the following list of twelve words in the precise order: “Bee, Fah, Do, Ram, Sep Til, Pons, Buf, Lin, Soos, Kit.” Variations on this order will produce an error message.

Step 2: Use these words to label things for a purpose that you will have to discover on your own. The following restrictions apply to this labeling activity.

1) The Flexible Application Principle. Feel free to apply these words as labels to any set of entities you desire,be they tangible or intangible, regardless of the fact that the entities already have unique names (such as cats, hats, and bats, etc.).

2) The Order-Irrelevance Principle. When applying the words to a set of entities, it doesn’t matter with which entity you choose to start.

3) The Stable-Order Principle. Starting with the first word, always assign the labels in exactly the same order each time that you use the list.

4) The One-One Principle. Apply a different label to each and every entity. Once you’ve used a specific label, do not use it again within the same activity.

5) The Cardinality Principle. The word applied to the last entity represents the quantity of the set.

As you surely have guessed, these are the precise rules every child has to learn in order to count things correctly. So let’s give credit to our little ones!

Tips for Parents

24 Months

  • Take notice of countable objects in your environment, i.e. cars, fence posts, flowers, etc. and slow down to give your little one a chance to count them.
  • Ask math related questions comparing relative values, for example, “Whose footprints are bigger?” “Which shell is the biggest?” “Which holds more, this pan or that pan?”
  • Grab a deck of cards and count the items and point out the match.

36 Months

  • Play Go Fish, where the goal is to accumulate as many pairs of the same-value card as you can.
  • Play War, where each player simultaneously turns over a card, and the player with the higher valued cad takes both. You can include only the small-value cards for younger children.

Excerpt from Baby Minds: Brain-Building Games your Baby Will Love by Linda Acredolo, Ph.D., and Susan Goodwyn, Ph.D.


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