This is a story with embedded video clips about a girl who is now my favorite counter. At the time of the interview, which took place on an early June near the end of the school year, Anna was a late-four-year-old girl who attended preschool in a low-income neighborhood of New York City. The interviewer was an assistant teacher in her classroom.
The topic of the interview, which lasted less than two minutes, was counting. The goal was to find out how high Anna could count. Why were we interested in this? One reason is that counting is useful. For example, children need to know the counting numbers in order to determine how many, that is, the number of objects in a collection. If the adult says, “You can have eight cookies,” the child can take advantage of the opportunity only if she knows the counting words up to at least eight and then can figure how to take no more, and no less, than eight.
A second reason is that the counting words are systematic, embodying important mathematical principles, particularly organizing numbers by tens. Learning the counting words can involve acquiring important mathematical ideas.
The interviewer begins with a simple request, namely to count as high as possible.
Resource type Video