Foundations of Early Childhood Number Sense

Number Preliminaries

Understanding character ordinal and cardinal numbers, the conservation of number, and numeric domains. Teachers facilitate educational variables to help children build their understanding of numbers.

Numerically Dominant Concepts

• Visual Numbers: Bringing collections to mind.
• Family Numbers: Understanding the oral number series.
• Common Numbers: Contemplating regularities in non-manipulable quantities.
• Big Numbers: Recognized first through writing.

What Are Numbers?

Initial Activities

Designed to foster understanding of the oral numerical series, spontaneous counting, enumeration, building collections, reading numbers, and identifying events of a number.

Types of Initial Activities

• Rituals: Assembly and daily number work.
• Casual: Spontaneous encounters.
• Specifics: Using tools like Cantinflas, boards, fingers (e.g., multiplying by 9), dice, and cards.

Counting Implies

• Reciting the numerical series.
• Approaches: Designing paths, separating objects, marking objects, establishing order, cardinalizing, and forming sets.

Procedures Used by Children

• Termwise Correspondence: Comparing sets to determine which is greater.
• Subset Correspondence: Comparing rows to identify differences.
• Visual Estimate: Estimating quantities.
• Subitizing: Unconsciously identifying small quantities (e.g., windows).
• Counting: Standard enumeration.
• Recounting: Starting from the beginning when adding sets.
• Sobrecontar (Counting On): Starting from the highest number to add.
• Discounting: Removing items from a total.
• Mixed: Using various techniques to compare elements.
• Calculation: Mental math without counting.

The Name of the Numbers

The oral numbering system is more complex than the written system, as it is not positional. The written system is a positional decimal system (0–9). Learning numbering occurs in three phases:

1. Global Approach: The most important phase involving early representations of numbers.
2. Algorithm Phase: Discovering regularities and rules of the written numerical series and the oral system.
3. Decimal Grouping: Understanding clusters and changes in figures.