Counting Project

Every September my first grade class does a counting project where we explore counting collections of different things in different ways. We spend several days with kids counting different collections with partners then recording the way they counted. I always love to see how their methods of counting, keeping track, and recording morph and become more efficient over the course of several days as they think up and try out different strategies with their partner. When we begin counting larger collections the kids begin to realize that they need more efficient ways to count and keep track than their original counting by 1 strategy and they start to develop more effective strategies such as grouping and counting by 5s and 10s.

After counting, exploring, discussing, thinking up new ideas, and repeating the process for several days we take on the whole class project of counting all of the unifix cubes in our math area. I always start by telling the class that there are over 1,000 cubes in the bin and we plan out how we could use our grouping strategies to help us count to such a high number. We decided that everyone in our class is good a counting by 10s and 100s so we could use those numbers to help us. The students started by sorting all of the cubes into ziploc bags in groups of 10 (leaving out the few extras that didn't fit into a group). The next day they worked together to create bags of 100 by putting 10 bags of 10 into gallon sized ziploc bags. The kids discovered that they were able to count above 1,000 once we were counting by 100! Once we had the cubes organized into bags of 100 plus the extra 10s and 1s left over we were able to have one of our first place value discussions and learn that we have 1, 769 unifix cubes total!

This is always a great project because it gets kids thinking about efficient ways to count and record their work through exploration with partners. It also gets them thinking about creating a strategy, trying it, modifying it, trying it again, and working toward more efficient strategies. It is one of the ways I like to get the class working on number sense and problem solving early in the school year and the class always loves doing it. Below are photos taken throughout our process (which took place on and off over the course of the last three weeks).

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