## 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: Counting

#### Age: 18-21 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 18-21 Months.

### Uses one-to-one correspondence when counting two objects

Situations for Observation of Skill

Observe the child during any activity of the day involving two or more of the same item (pieces of fruit or cereal, toy cars, blocks, etc.).

Elicitation Strategy

Ask the child to give you two of something. “Can I have two cars?” Alternatively, ask the child to count how many of an item he has.

Behavior Observed

The child will hand the adult two items or will point in sequence to the first two items before losing one-to-one correspondence with the words and objects.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Help parents understand that the first three aspects of understanding numbers are using one-to-one correspondence (or having only one number name for each item); invariant sequence (the items counted are always in the same sequence), and cardinality (the last number stated is the total amount). Parents can help children learn these foundations by helping the child point to each item as it is counted, by helping them learn the number sequence a little at a time (emphasize up to 3 items), and at the end of the count say the total amount (“One, two. You gave me two”).

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/.