Counting is easily taken for granted, but it’s the first step on the mathematical journey.

It’s not too surprising therefore that there is a lot of fascinating research into how we learn to count – and there’s more to it than you may think.

This research suggests that toddlers – even as young as twelve months – have a sense of how many there are in a set, up to around three objects.

This comes from their innate sense of number.

For this activity, we practiced counting toy gold pieces, separating them by number.

Students were given three “pots o’gold” with different numerals on them.

They were then directed to place the corresponding number of coins into the pots!