Dynamic Counting: A Suggestion for Developing Flexibility with Counting and Place Value

It is frequently surprising to new teachers (and even those with experience) when they find that not only do some children need to recount the group they have just counted to be assured of the total but also that this need seems to be resistant to intervention. Although moving from "counting-all" to "count-on" is sometimes assumed to be constrained by developmental factors, it is the teacher's responsibility to continually explore methods and pedagogies for accelerating such transitions. Similarly, it is surprising how difficult some students seem to find answering questions like 32 + 10, 95 - 10, 326 + 100, etc. Although many students in Year 1 may begin to grasp place value in an elementary sense, applying this knowledge dynamically (i.e., as a number changes), rather than statistically (i.e., to an individual number), is often a far slower process. Moreover, it is difficult to find the right experiences to help students develop fluency in flexibly applying their knowledge of place value to solve such problems. In this short article, the authors present the principle of Dynamic Counting, and a set of activities related to this principle, as a teaching tool that might be useful in addressing both of these issues.