Thursday, March 15, 2012

What Children Need to Be Able to Count


John looks at the spread on the dining table and says cheerfully, "There are sixteen green apples."

For John to be able to say this, he needs to (1) have an awareness that numbers can be use to tell amount (use of numbers as cardinal numbers) (2) be able to recite numbers, at least to sixteen, in the correct order (3) be able to perform one-to-one correspondence (4) be able to classify.

Anyway, a friend just told a (real) conversation that happened recently.

My friend: I went to the IT Show at Suntec and got myself iPad2. My friend got iPad3.

His colleague: So you guys got 5 iPads lah.

My friend: Huh?! No lah. Just two.

His colleague: I thought you said you got iPad, two and your friend got iPad, three. Five altogether, what.

:) One is using number as a cardinal number and the other, as an ordinal number.

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