## North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

#### Domain: NC Foundations for Early Learning: Cognitive Development (CD)

#### Subdomain: Mathematical Thinking and Expression

#### Goal: Children show understanding of numbers and quantities during play and other activities

#### Skill Progression: Recognizing number and subitizing

#### Age: 33-36 Months

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### Understands concept of “all” or “none” relating to number of objects

Situations for Observation of Skill

Observe (or join) the family during a meal or snack. Play I Spy with everyone at the table, focusing on using terms related to amount.

Elicitation Strategy

Let all family members who are older than the child know that the game will look at knowing labels for amounts and they should let the youngest family member have time to respond first. Adults can then ask some questions that will be too difficult for the youngest member, but appropriate for the others. During the meal or snack family members take turns stating what they see. “I see a plate that has more beans than mine.” “I see a plate with the same number of tacos as Mommy’s.”

Behavior Observed

Observe and listen to the child’s responses to the I Spy items. The discussion about whether someone is right or wrong can also reveal understanding.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Learning concepts such as “all,” “none” “more” or “same” requires the child to make comparisons. Such games motivate the child to examine and compare amount using concepts that do not always employ one-to-one correspondence or counting. Encourage parents to use these terms with their child. Emphasize the importance of understanding these concepts to later success in math in school.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2015

©2015 by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.