Unifix Counting Towers
Age group
- Early Years (Age 3 to 6)
Curriculum Goal
Kindergarten: Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviour
- Demonstrate an understanding of numbers, using concrete materials to explore and investigate counting, quantity, and number relationships (#15).
- Apply the mathematical processes to support the development of mathematical thinking, to demonstrate understanding, and to communicate thinking and learning in mathematics, while engaged in play-based learning and in other contexts (#20).
Related Links
Context
Students work one-on-one with an educator.
Materials
- 1 to 10 number line (Appendix A)
- 1 to 10 number cards (Appendix B)
- 55 unifix cubes of the same colour
Lesson
- Ask the child to point and read each number on the number line (Appendix A).
- Put the deck of number cards (Appendix B) upside down.
- Invite the child to select a number card, read the number and build the corresponding “tower”.
- The child continues the activity until they have turned over every card and completed the staircase of towers from one to ten.
- Ask children comparison questions – How many more cubes are there in Tower 5 than there are in Tower 4?
Look Fors
- Do children have one-to-one correspondence when counting?
- How comfortably can children recognize the symbolic number and build the corresponding tower?
- Can children answer comparison questions accurately?