Cardinality "Under Construction"

My inquiry topic to help move children from stage one to stage two is still "under construction".   As with building real buildings gaining knowledge for some requires an ordered process of laying down one brick at a time and not just pouring a large slab of concrete and seeing a building suddenly appear.

 I am building up the number knowledge and number sense of those who have not yet fully grasped the idea of cardinality and therefore can not move on to addition and subtraction.  Some children have moved from rote counting "onetwothreefourfivesix..." to assigning a value to the words and connecting one word to one object.  Others are working on counting the number in a set only once and I have found putting these sets into a regular pattern or order helps these children.  Irregular or scattered patterns leads to double counting.  Another block some children still need to overcome, is that a number is always the same no matter where it is or the size or colour of the objects.

We continue to practice and enjoy maths even though progress it is at a slower pace for some.