Counting with understanding (up to 20)

Hello mathematicians, I hope you're having a really delightful day today. I wondered if you would help me do some counting today? You will? Thank you. I have some pasta here, which is becoming one of my favorite bits of mathematical equipment and a cup. And I'm going to take a scoop of my pasta. Can you have a look in there? Can you see?

About how many pieces of pasta do you think I might have? What's your estimate? Can you write it down? Okay, and can you read that number for me? Oh, I can hear lots of different ideas. I'm gonna tip these out now and we should count them to work out how many we have. Are you ready to count with me? Okay, let's go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ,15, 16 and 17. I have 17 things here.

Let's try counting backwards. If I count them back into my cup. So can you remember how many we had? Yeah, 17. So I have 17, now I have 16, now I have 15, now I have 14, now 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and zero.

Nice counting mathematicians. Now that we counted it back into our cup, let's, let's count them again and see what happens. I wonder if there's another way that we could count? Last time we counted them all by ones. Oh, let's count by twos. But I think I only know my twos up until a few numbers and then I might get stuck, so, so let's try. Ready? 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and now I get a bit stuck in my head so I could keep counting but just keep counting using what I know about counting by ones. So there's 10 here, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. 17 things.

And you know what I was wondering, is if I spread these all out like this, how many things do I have? Yeah, 17 'cause it doesn't matter if I spread them out, or if I clump them in close together. How many do I have? That's right. 17.

So what was the mathematics we were working on? Today we were practicing counting with understanding. So this means that we can connect the number words to items as we're counting them, both forwards and backwards, and that once we've worked out how many, once we've quantified our collection, it doesn't matter if we spread it out or push it all back in together, we still trust that it's 17 or the quantity that we counted.

Nice work today little mathematicians!