Counting Buddies: Numbers All Around Us
Look at your hand right now. Wiggle your fingers. You have 5 on one hand and 5 on the other — 10 in all! Numbers are hiding everywhere: on doors, on clocks, on your favorite cereal box. Today we go on a counting hunt and learn a fun trick for adding small numbers fast.
What You'll Learn
- How to count objects one at a time without skipping any - How to use your fingers to add numbers up to 10 - What "more than" and "fewer than" mean - How to find numbers hiding in your house
Counting Without Skipping
When you count a pile of blocks, touch each one as you say its number out loud: "1... 2... 3..." This is called one-to-one counting, and it's the most important counting rule there is. If you skip a block or count one twice, you'll get the wrong answer, even if you say all the right number words!
Adding With Your Fingers
Let's add 3 + 2. Hold up 3 fingers on one hand. Now hold up 2 fingers on the other hand. Count ALL the fingers you're holding up together: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So 3 + 2 = 5! You can do this trick with any two small numbers as long as the total is 10 or less — that's how many fingers you've got.
If a number is bigger than 5, start counting from your first hand's total instead of starting over at 1. For 4 + 3: hold up 4 fingers, then count "5, 6, 7" as you raise 3 more. It's faster than starting from zero!
More Than, Fewer Than
If you have 6 crayons and your friend has 4 crayons, you have MORE crayons and your friend has FEWER. We can check this by lining the crayons up in two rows and seeing which row runs out first — the shorter row has fewer.
You count a pile of buttons and touch each one as you say a number. What is this counting rule called?
Maria has 7 stickers and Jonah has 5 stickers. Who has fewer stickers?
House Number Hunt
Walk around your home (with a grown-up) and find 8 different numbers — on a clock, a remote control, a book page, a cereal box, a calendar, etc. For each number you find, write it down and draw or describe where you found it. Deliverable: a list of all 8 numbers with their locations.
Long ago, some people counted using knots tied in rope or scratches on bones, because paper and pencils didn't exist yet! Counting is one of the oldest things humans have ever done.
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