Practical Learning Activity
Explanations of basic counting concepts, with questions and answers.
Counting
When you first begin counting you might want to practice saying the numbers one to ten as you count on your fingers like this:
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Apples, oranges or raspberries can easily be counted.
For instance, here are some raspberries,
If you count them you will see that there are eight raspberries, as shown below,
How many raspberries do you see here? Try counting them, then use, ‘Show Answer,’ below, to reveal the answer.
Show Answer
$$There\; are \;5\; \; (five)\;raspberries$$
How many raspberries do you see here? Try counting them.
Show Answer
$$There\; are\; 10\; (ten) \;raspberries$$
Addition
You can easily add the number of raspberries together by using maths sums as follows,
Try to do all of the above maths sum yourself, by counting the number of raspberries.
Now try the following sums, by counting on your fingers, then writing the answer on a piece of paper. Remember to see if your answer was correct.
$$\;5\;+\;3\;=\;$$
Show Answer
$$ \;8\;(eight) $$
$$\;4\;+\;5\;=\;$$
Show Answer
$$\;9\;(nine)$$
Subtraction
You can easily take away or subtract the number of raspberries by using maths equations as follows,
Try to do all of the above maths equations yourself, by counting the number of raspberries in the equations.
Now try the following subtraction equations, by counting on your fingers, then writing the answer on a piece of paper. Remember to see if your answer was correct.
$$\;10\;-\;2\;=\;$$
Show Answer
$$ \;8\;(eight) $$
$$\;8\;-\;5\;=\;$$
Show Answer
$$\;3\;(three)$$
Sometimes you can use your fingers to help you do maths. You can use other things as well. Here is an example where tiny sticks are used to represent numbers,
Try to count right along these two lines from one to six and then from seven to twelve. You can see that the number of sticks increase as the numbers get bigger. As we continue counting this way we can see the pile of sticks growing as the numbers get higher,
That is a lot of sticks! But if you were to continue, it would not be long before your pile of sticks would be massive. Here is what the pile of sticks would look like by the time you got to one hundred.
