Of all the math skills that children will acquire, counting is one that most children will already be doing before they reach school-age. Rote counting (or saying numbers in a sequence from memory) is what most children will be able to do, but this does not mean that they can actually determine the amount in a collection.

In order to help our students develop an actual understanding of numbers and how counting relates to real life, we did a counting activity with sections of a kite aimed at developing their one-to-one correspondence.

By placing pieces of a kite into a numbered order (counting as they did so), participants were able to make a connection between the spoken numeral and a concrete amount.