Step 1–The “I do” step: Always begin with a teacher demonstration:

Once kindergarteners can say the numbers by rote, the hard part is to develop the one-to-one correspondence between the words and the touching. This is much more difficult to do correctly than you might think. For starters, counting to ten by rote may seem like too little ones like a couple of long words, “One two three four five six seven eight nine ten.” To teach them to touch each object and say only one word for each, the task must be done together, slowly and correctly, many times.

The “You Do” portion of Worksheet A (see above) asks students to count the objects and select, rather than produce or write, the correct number for the number of objects they see in the box. This is identical to the teacher demonstration exercise at the top of the worksheet. The teacher has demonstrated how to do this task already. Students just need to remember that from the demonstration a few minutes prior.

Students are asked to make that distinction, to choose between two and three, by circling the right one–as was done in the top six boxes in the teacher demonstration part of the worksheet. The demonstration answers at the top of the worksheet will be available for students to use as a model of the correct answer. Students learn from practicing the correct answer rather than from practicing errors, so error-free work is the goal. Student needs to be able to count by rote, at least to five before beginning these worksheets.  The student will learn to count by rote up to 12 by the time they are done.