How Did You Count

H ow D i d Yo u C o u nt ?
How Did You

Count?
T E A C H E R’ S G U I D E
C H R I S TO P H E R D A N I E L S O N
Cover and select interior photography by Asha Belk
First published 2025

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To Rachel, Griffin, and Tabitha; for your
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C O N T E N TS
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Chapter 1: What Counts as Counting? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 2: How Counting Develops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Chapter 3: Using How Did You Count? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Chapter 4: Mathematical Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Chapter 5: Answers Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Acknowledgments
This book has spent years in incubation. As a result, many, many people have had a
chance to influence, nurture, and support the work along the way. I am grateful to all of
them, and I need to express that gratitude to some of them directly.
Thanks to Simon Gregg for offering frequent glimpses into his and his colleagues’
classrooms, and for sharing his students’ thinking via annotations—both publicly
on Twitter, and behind the scenes. Thank you, Lauren Baucom for your stories, the
photograph in Chapter 2, and your careful and thoughtful review of the mathematics in
that chapter. Thanks to Anand Thakker and his daughter for staging a penny-counting
photograph, to Chris and Chase Lusto for their story about pairs of things, to Faith and
Clem Moynihan for telling me about three (the magic number), and to Chris Nho for his
fabulous animation of the tetrahedron of tangerines, stills from which I have included in
Chapter 4.
Thank you, Kristin Thomas for being a kind and supportive friend and colleague, for
inviting me into your classroom to play with first graders, and for letting me use your
interactive whiteboard for the annotations in Chapter 5.
Thanks to Margaret Williams for organizing my classroom visits, and to classroom
teachers Chelsea Zerr, Leslie Witucki, Megan Beranek, Kate Schaffer, Janene Unke,
Nicole Egan, Hillary Schraut, Danielle Plumley, and Cassie Alexis. You all hosted me
graciously in your classrooms, and I am grateful. Please pass my thanks along to your
beautiful, diverse, and brilliant students for sharing their thinking.
Thank you to my former student Marissa Brown for taking such a perfect photograph
for noticing the associative property of multiplication. Thanks to Brynn DeVaan for her
diligence with the sphere-stacking frame designs which make cameo appearances in
Chapters 2 and 4, and to Lauren Siegel for getting us started with sphere-stacking play
in the first place.
Tracy Zager edited early versions of the Teacher’s Guide with her usual thoughtfulness,
grace, and critical questioning. I am deeply grateful. Kassia Wedekind picked up
where Tracy left off, and has been an equally worthy adversary… er… editor, colleague,
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and friend. Asha Belk took the beautiful photographs that fill the student book. Her
camera skills and artistic eye made this book gorgeous. Her patience, thoughtfulness,
and attention to detail made it better. Thank you, Asha! Thank you, too, to the entire
Stenhouse team, past and present, and especially to Dan Tobin and Toby Gordon who
first saw a place at Stenhouse for books that go into the hands of both children and
adults. Thank you to Helen Strain, Sarah Fish, Melanie Moy, and the entire production
team for making this book beautiful as you have the previous ones.
Online Materials
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CHAPTER 1
What Counts as Counting?
N
umbers are funny.
I mean, what even are they? Do they actually exist, or are they products
of our imagination? What does five mean? These are questions that
mathematicians, philosophers, and young children all consider at some point.
The rest of us spend most of our time unaware that we don’t actually know the answers.
Fittingly then, I’d like to open this book by telling you a story that a mathematician
passed along to me a while back.
Peter is a university mathematician, married to a mathematician colleague of mine at
the time, Peggy. Peggy introduced me to Peter at a wedding reception, and I came to
understand that Peter was a fan of my Talking Math with Your Kids work. He was eager
to relate to me an interaction he had recently witnessed.
A young child—perhaps three or four years old—was asked, “Do you have more
fingers on your left hand, or on your right hand?” Many of us—including Peter—would
have expected the child to know and use the fact that they had five fingers on each
hand to answer that question, or perhaps to count them.
Instead, the child responded without counting, but by matching the fingers thumb-to-
thumb, index-to-index, etc.
“The child invented one-to-one correspondence!” my mathematician friend exclaimed
with pleasure. That a young child could answer a question about numbers without
counting was delightful to him, in part because it challenges our ideas about numbers
and what they are for. It certainly challenges the perception most of us have about the
sophistication of young children’s minds.
1
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Another friend and colleague of mine recently asked, “If I know that there are four
groups of five things, but I don’t know that’s twenty altogether, have I actually counted
those things?” A more extreme version of that question might ask, “If I know that there
are two groups of one hundred things, or two hundreds of them, but I don’t know that’s
two hundred, have I actually counted those things?”
Like I said, numbers are funny.
How Did You Count? proceeds from an assumption that we know enough about what
numbers are to function in the world. A good-enough definition of numbers is that they
are adjectives that describe how many things there are. I bought twenty avocados is a
sentence with the same structure as I bought green avocados. Twenty and green are
both adjectives. Unlike colors, there are lots of ways to know which number adjective to
use. There are lots of ways to know how many.
We’ll call all of these counting. Counting is how you know how many.
OK. That’s not quite true. If you know at a glance how many dots are on a die,
you have subitized rather than counted. And if a family member tells you there
are nine eggs remaining in the carton, then here too you know a quantity without
counting.
But by and large, the work you do to figure out how many of something there are—or
were, or could, might, or will be—are forms of counting.
Colloquially, counting means one at a time. Point to the first object, say one; point to
the next and say two, and so on, where the last number you say while pointing to the
final object is the size of the set—the count. Early in elementary school, children learn to
count by other convenient numbers. Twos are nice because they are easy to see and to
keep track of. Fives and tens require some preparation work, but that work pays off if
you’re counting to a number such as 85 or 152.
Teacher Lauren Carr has frequently documented her students’ beautiful and brilliant
counting work on social media. A while back, she shared a video in which students look
at each other’s groupings of large collections of objects and deduce the underlying
counting strategy. For the arrangement pictured in Figure 1.1, we hear a student count,
“five, ten, fifteen, twenty,” as they gesture at the larger groups of goldfish crackers
across the top of the image. They continue from there, counting by twos across the
2
W hat C ou n t s a s C ou n ti n g ?
FIGURE 1.1
Counting goldfish
middle row, “twenty-two, twenty-four…” and ending in the lower right-hand corner,
having counted fifty goldfish.
Ms. Carr’s students have both represented (by making groups) and interpreted
(by skip-counting the groups their classmates made) important and useful number
structures. These young mathematicians are learning important things about
counting.
Each of these—counting objects individually or in pairs or in groups of five or ten—
involves reciting a number sequence (one, two, three… or two, four, six… etc.). This
recitation is one meaning of the word counting.
This book is concerned with a broader sense of counting. Here, counting is an activity
whose purpose is knowing how many, and one that relies on structure. If I count a
collection of buttons individually, the structure I’m using is one-to-one correspondence.
3
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 1.2
Shoes
Same deal if I count by twos,

except that I’m skipping one
number word, and also skipping
one object so maybe it’s two-to-
two correspondence.
If I see six rows of five eggs,
I can know that there are thirty
eggs without reciting any other
numbers in my head or in my
mind. This, too, is counting.
Children understand that
counting is figuring out how
many there are, even if you haven’t counted one-by-one. The image in Figure 1.2
is from my book How Many? and it has been the basis of several versions of the
following conversation in many classrooms, with children ranging in age from six to
twelve.
Student: There are twenty of those little silver circles.

Me: Those are called eyelets. How do you know there are twenty eyelets?
Student: I counted them.
Me: You counted?
Student: Yes. In my head.
Me: Did you say the numbers eighteen and nineteen as you did that?
Student: No. There’s ten on one shoe, and twenty on both shoes.
Me: So you said one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and then you knew
there were two tens, which is twenty?
Student: Yes.
4
In my early work with How Many? I saw this conversation differently than I do now.
Initially, I took “I counted” to be a tactic for not stating a strategy in full—perhaps
because doing so is difficult, or perhaps because doing so was too risky in front of
their peers, or in front of me. Perhaps it was the only answer they could imagine to
the question, “How do you know there are that many?” I saw I counted as an evasion;
a way of engaging less fully. My follow-up question, “Did you say eighteen?," was a
strategic move to counter that perceived evasion. I suspected they were telling me
they did something (counting one-by-one) that they didn’t actually do; that they
were hiding—or unable to make explicit—the patterns and structures they were
using.
Now I understand that when I ask, “How do you know?," children have several
categories of ways of knowing, including these:
• I just know
• My friend told me
• I guessed
• I counted
When I look at it this way, I can see that “I counted” isn’t an evasion of the “How do
you know?” question—none of these responses is. Instead, it is a good faith effort at
categorizing among several different ways of knowing. This shift in thinking led me to
start asking a new follow-up question: “How did you count?”
I used to see “I counted” as something I needed to push back on; I wanted to
demonstrate that in fact this child didn’t count; they had instead done something more
interesting and sophisticated. Now I see “I counted” as an invitation from the child to
talk about how they counted. This book accepts that invitation, and then issues it to all. I
want us to invite everyone to the counting party.
5
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Here are five common ways children know that there are twenty eyelets on the shoes
in Figure 1.2:
• one-by-one
• by twos
• by fives
• four groups of five
• two groups of ten
Children have offered each of these while answering the question, “How did you count?”
They understand something that I did not: counting is a way of knowing how many
there are. In this Teacher’s Guide, I’ll explore relationships among these various counting
strategies.
This book is in part a result of my wanting to explore children’s ways of counting,
and of wanting to support children in developing new ways of counting for themselves
in conversation with their peers and caregivers. Also, this book is the product of many
years of my own learning to see the structure of numbers.
An important stage in this learning took place about ten years ago, when I was
teaching at a community college. I designed a series of small assignments for
the students in my math course for elementary and special education teachers in
order to help them to investigate math in their lives, and outside of textbooks. I
had been thinking about the frequent claim that “math is everywhere,” and about
relationships between children’s everyday math experiences and the math they
study in school. I had also been learning with online colleagues about capturing
students’ curiosity with imagery. Unlike at the beginning of my teaching career,
most of my college students had instant access to digital photography through their
cell phones (and those who did not still had less-than-instant access via friends and
family members).
6
FIGURE 1.3
Shoe rack
This series of assignments

required students to look
around them, notice particular
mathematical structures in their
worlds, and then to take and
submit photographs for the
rest of the class to see. Topics
changed from one semester
to the next, and included
five, hexagons, groups, and
arrays.
I thought of these
assignments mostly as learning
opportunities for my students.
I thought about widening
their perspectives on what
math is, and about providing
experiences with conceptual
and technological tools for
teaching their future students.
All of that took place, but
the students’ photographs also had a lasting impact on my own perspective of
math in the everyday world. The moment I saw Marissa’s photo of a shoe rack
(Figure 1.3) as I prepped for class one day, I laughed aloud with delight. Marissa had
submitted her photo for the arrays prompt. I saw the array that Marissa saw, but
I also saw more.
Before I tell you what I saw, take a moment to count the shoes in Marissa’s photo.
Capture in words, symbols, or images how you counted the shoes.
7
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Did you see either four rows of six shoes or twelve pairs of shoes? Maybe you saw
something different, but these two are the most common due to the structure of the
rack (rows) and the structure of shoes (pairs). Seeing the shoes either way leads to
a total of twenty-four shoes, but the first way has us thinking about 4 × 6 while the
second way has us thinking about 12 × 2.
On one level, this was a lovely example of an array photograph. On another level, it
was an example of the associative property of multiplication (about which I will say
a great deal more in Chapter 2), something I had previously only considered to be an
abstract truth about numbers.
Formally stated, the associative property of multiplication is this:
(A × B) × C = A × (B × C) for all possible values of A, B, and C.
But here was a photo that helped me and my students see the associative property as
being about groups.
(A groups of B) groups of C = A groups of (B groups of C).
Or in this case:
(4 rows of 3) pairs of shoes = 4 rows of (3 pairs of shoes)
That’s 12 pairs, or 12 × 2 on the left, and 4 groups of 6, or 4 × 6 on the right.

The associative property of multiplication is a sophisticated idea. What excited
me about Marissa’s photo was how it brought a sophisticated idea within children’s
grasp. As with other open-ended math prompts—such as How Many? and Which One
Doesn’t Belong?—there are multiple right answers to the question How Did You Count?
Furthermore, the differences between answers to this question are productive.
I designed the images in How Did You Count? with the goal of helping children
notice, describe, and use a wide range of sophisticated mathematical structures, such
as the associative property of multiplication. As usual, however, when I began visiting
8
classrooms with these images, children noticed, described, and used relationships that I
had not noticed myself.
In Chapter 2 of this Teacher’s Guide, I’ll describe the math I embedded in these
images, and I’ll explain the importance of that math for a range of elementary school
learners, as well as for secondary students.
Chapter 3 is about implementation. How can you use these images in classrooms
and other settings? How can you support students in generalizing from the particular
example of a single image to other places and ways that the same ideas and structures
appear elsewhere?
In Chapter 4, I’ll shift to the mathematics that children see in these images, and how
they describe it. Finally, Chapter 5 is an answer key of sorts, where you can quickly
find correct totals, as well as
common counting strategies for
each image.
But first, I’ll end this chapter
with a short description of the
difference between the math I
intended and the math children
notice.
The big dice image (Figure
1.4) consists of five groups
of five groups of five dots.
There are 5 x 5 x 5, or 53 dots
on the tops of these dice.
This repeated multiplication
introduces exponents in the
same way that repeated
addition sometimes introduces
FIGURE 1.4
Many dots
9
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
multiplication (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 is 4 groups of 3, or 4 • 3). Because exponents are a

sophisticated topic, and because the number of dots is much larger than most of the
numbers in this book, I expected the big dice page to be an especially difficult counting
task for elementary students. I was wrong.
Third- through fifth-grade students are highly adept at using fives to count. Many of the
children I talked with noticed that each smaller X had twenty-five dots, so there are five
25s (5 • 25). Others noticed that two Xs have ten dice, each with five dots (10 • 5) +
(10 • 5) + (5 • 5). Some children made pairs of dice—each pair with ten total dots—and
then there was one leftover die: 12(2 • 5) + 5. In short, children are brilliant mathematicians.
It was almost enough to make me wish I had included my 54 dice photo instead of
only 53. In case you would like to stretch your students’ thinking about fives, or fractals,
or exponents, I share that photo in Figure 1.5.
When I first began teaching, I
was enamored with sophisticated
techniques for solving simple
problems. In the ensuing years,
I have come to delight in and to
celebrate the simple techniques
that children devise for solving
sophisticated problems. I hope
that this Teacher’s Guide supports
your own inquiry into children’s
mathematics, and I hope that
the images elicit brilliance from
the children you do math with—
wherever you and they may
count.
FIGURE 1.5
So many dots
10
CHAPTER 2
How Counting Develops
M
y friend Lauren’s daughter Naomi happened across a tire gauge (Figure 2.1)
one day when she was four and a half years old. Perhaps the tire gauge was
in a toolbox, or a junk drawer, or just lying around in anticipation of some
upcoming automotive maintenance.
“Ten… twenty… thirty… forty… fifty… sixty… seventy… eighty… ninety…”
Here, she paused for a few

moments.
“…Tenty TEN! MOM! This thing

goes all the way up to TENTY
TEN!"
Learning to count involves

a fascinating mix of biology,
culture, and logic. Human
brains are wired to notice
FIGURE 2.1
A tire gauge that goes all the way
to (and perhaps beyond?) tenty ten.
11
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
and use quantities, but the ways we write and say numbers are invented by people.
Children encounter those ways as they go about their everyday lives. They overhear
conversations; they read books and play games with their parents; they help out around
the house; they investigate the objects that surround them, and along the way they
notice, wonder, imagine, think, and experiment.
Naomi gives us a glimpse of this fact. She has heard the words ten, twenty, and so on
many times. She has probably not heard the word tenty many times, and possibly she
never has. She—like many children learning to count in English—probably invented it as
the logical extension of the patterns in the words. It’s not correct in the sense of being
conventional, but it is correct in the sense of being logical, and in that other people can
know what she means.
I think of the primary audience for this book as teachers—it is a Teacher's Guide after
all. Nonetheless, I have tried to write in a way that can speak to anyone with an interest
in children’s mathematical development. This includes parents and other caregivers, and
also scholarly folks who may not have any regular, direct contact with children learning
mathematics, but who work with future or practicing teachers.
I also want to address the term mathematician at the outset of this chapter, as
it appears several times here. I think of mathematics as a discipline—one that has
practices, language, and customs that are useful for studying numbers, patterns, and
space. (Please forgive the vague and incomplete nature of this characterization; it is
intended to be good enough to sketch out a big picture, not to be a rigorous definition.
Writing a more rigorous definition of mathematics is a very interesting thing to attempt,
but not essential to the current project.)
Anyone engaging in these practices is acting—in that moment—as a mathematician.
We may be accustomed to mathematician applying only to people who work at a
university, perhaps with a chalkboard on their office wall, and who publish mathematical
papers. I used to think this way. I used to think doing mathematics meant expanding the
boundaries of human knowledge—developing new ideas that the world had never known
before. Now I understand that doing mathematics means expanding the boundaries of
your own knowledge using the tools of the discipline. Naomi, in noticing a pattern in
the numbers on the tire gauge and inventing language (tenty) to describe that pattern,
12
H o w C o u nting D e v el o ps
was very much behaving as a mathematician. When I use the term mathematician
in this chapter, I am referring to the larger community, and I will use professional
mathematician to refer to the subset of that community that consists of people spending
their professional lives discovering and inventing ideas that are new to the community.
You—the reader—and I are members of this community of mathematicians. Most of
us adults have little memory of our own process of learning to count, the challenges
and the triumphs. In this chapter, I’ll highlight some typical landmarks for young
mathematicians in this process, beginning with ways of understanding quantities
that we come by naturally, and moving forward through much of elementary school
arithmetic and far, far beyond.
Let’s begin with numbers that don’t require counting: one, two, and three.
SUBITIZING
As an exercise, look quickly at the sets of dots in Figure 2.2 and say how many dots are
in each set. If you were to this while hooked up to an elaborate machine that displays
such collections, with randomly chosen quantities and arrangements, for only a brief
period of time, and that measures in milliseconds the time it takes you to say how many
there are, then the results will probably be that you recognize one, two, or three objects
in about the same amount of time. The time you need to identify four, five, or six objects,
however, will grow at a roughly constant rate with each additional object. The standard
interpretation of these results is that there is something different going on in your
brain when you recognize three objects at a glance than when you count five objects.
The name for this number-
recognition-without-counting
process is subitizing, and from
experiments with infants (and
certain animals, including crows),
it appears to be preverbal and
FIGURE 2.2
Arbitrary arrangements of dots
13
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.3
Quincunx
innate. In fact, babies as young as a few weeks

old recognize the difference between two
and three objects (Dehaene 2011). Our ability
to subitize numbers less than four may even
account for why every fifth mark in a set of
tally marks goes across the previous four.
Three is easy to subitize: III, and four is more
than that: IIII. Most of us would struggle to
know whether we’re looking at four or five
tally marks when they’re written this way: IIIII.
This direct perception of quantity is
the original, cognitive-science sense of
subitizing. You can learn to recognize larger sets in particular arrangements, such as
the quincunx (Figure 2.3), which you probably know as the arrangement of five dots on
a standard die. With practice and training, you can become familiar enough with these
arrangements that your response times would be very close to those for three objects.
This new skill would only work for the arrangements you studied. By contrast, the ability
to subitize three objects doesn’t depend on any specific arrangement.
Math education researcher Douglas Clements (1999) refers to the innate recognition
of quantity, together with trained recognition of particular arrangements, as perceptual
subitizing. Clements also adds a new category, conceptual subitizing, which refers to
the skill of identifying quantities in a briefly seen image, even when you do some post-
viewing thinking.
As an exercise, look briefly at Figure 2.4 and then cover it up. With the figure still
covered up, determine how many dots you saw. Then read on.
If you tried the exercise, you may have recalled that Figure 2.4 has three rows of four
dots, with one dot missing from the last row. 3 x 4 is 12. Subtract one, and you’ll know there
are eleven dots. Along the way, you may have said to yourself three, four, twelve, eleven,
14
FIGURE 2.4
How many dots (with a quick
glance)?
so there is substantially more

thinking involved than in a direct
perception of quantity. For this
reason, I have chosen not to use
conceptual subitizing to describe
this thinking when elicited in this
book, but instead to combine
work of this sort with other kinds
of counting strategies.
Antonia Cameron (2020) has
written about Quick Images as
a classroom routine for young learners. Her perspective that quick images are a tool for
moving children beyond one-by-one counting is helpful, and consistent with my own
understanding of the utility of the technique.
The characteristic that a task like the one in Figure 2.4 has in common with subitizing
is discerning quantity from a brief glance. Certainly that brief glance forces you to
subitize parts of the image, such as three rows, and four in each row. But knowing
what pieces to look for, what to attend to when viewing a structured image, and
working with those pieces once the image is no longer in view are all important
counting strategies. Furthermore, a task such as the eleven dots shares an important
characteristic with all good counting tasks—there is more than one way to do it. I
suggested three rows of four dots with one missing earlier. You might have seen four
columns of three dots with one missing, or a 3-by-3 grid with two more, or something
different altogether. Subitizing is a quick, answer-focused task. Counting is a slower,
richer, strategy-focused task.
The instructional strategy of showing arrangements quickly, so that children
cannot count one-by-one, and so that they must rely on structure, is a lovely one.
15
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
I will call the work children are doing counting in order to show how it provides
connections between counting objects one-by-one and the generalized ideas of
algebra. The story of counting itself begins at the beginning, with the whole number
counting sequence.
THE COUNTING SEQUENCE (A.K.A. THE NUMBER POEM)

One evening when my children were six and four years old, the six-year-old wanted
something from me; I cannot recall what it was. I was doing the dishes and I told him
he’d need to wait two minutes. Somehow we established that this was 120 seconds
and he announced that he could count to 120 while running laps of the first floor of
our home—from the kitchen, through the living room, turning left into the dining room
and back to the kitchen. Of course I stopped what I was doing to film this. I wasn’t
100 percent sure he’d get to 120 without error; I was curious about how his counting
rate would compare to his lap-running rate, and how it would change from beginning to
end. You can view this video at: https://vimeo.com/23501648.
My daughter—the four-year-old at the time—has always had a deep sense of fairness.
If something is unfair or inequitable, she will notice and she will say something about
it. It’s an admirable quality (even if at times inconvenient for parenting in the moment),
and it started early. On this particular evening, she noticed the inequity in attention. Her
brother was making a counting video; she wanted to make one too. So we did, and you
can view this one at: https://vimeo.com/23543507.
Here was her counting sequence: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23,
24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 22, 23. There is a lot going on here. Consider these four features of
Tabitha’s counting:
• She counts one to twelve correctly and confidently.
• She skips some teens.
• She skips twenty.
• She doesn’t get past twenty-nine.
16
Each of these features is instructive for what it means to learn to count in English.
She counts one to twelve correctly and confidently. Counting one to twelve is not
a logical process. If you know the English words for one through seven, you cannot
guess the word for eight. You don’t figure out how to count from one to twelve; you
memorize it. You memorize it through repetition—reading counting books, counting
along to animated Sesame Street videos, watching and listening to parents, teachers,
older siblings, and other caregivers either deliberately demonstrating this counting or
naturally counting as they go about their daily lives.
These are all opportunities to absorb the language of counting, and young
children’s minds are uniquely optimized for learning language. Children learn initial
counting words in the same way they learn color words and the names of the letters
of the alphabet—through a combination of deliberate exposure and immersion in
culture.
She skips some teens. The numbers thirteen through nineteen have a structure—
something derived from the initial counting sequence, followed by the syllable teen.
Some of these number names are recognizable from earlier numbers: seventeen,
eighteen, nineteen, but others—thirteen and fifteen—are more disguised. Furthermore,
children encounter these numbers with lower frequency. You probably know lots of
counting books that stop at ten or twelve, relatively fewer that continue to twenty.
And anytime you count to twenty by ones, you get there by way of the numbers one
through twelve. The reverse is not true—counting to twelve doesn’t involve reciting any
teens, nor saying twenty. This combination of imperfect structure and lower frequency
means that young children frequently have a mental model of one, two, … eleven,
twelve, and then some teens.
She skips twenty. The twenties are well structured. Once you know twenty-one, you
can guess twenty-two, and keep guessing straight on to twenty-nine. (Why did Tabitha
skip twenty-seven? Who knows? She’s four.) But skipping twenty is extremely common.
This is because the sequence that gives the twenties their structure—the original one
through nine sequence—starts at one. If we started counting at zero, you might expect
Tabitha to say eighteen, nineteen, twenty-zero, twenty-one. While uncommon, twenty-
zero is a thing young children occasionally say. Another common follow-up to nineteen
17
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
is tenteen, and all of these errors are strong indications that children are working with
the patterns and structure of number language at this point, rather than memorizing as
they must one through twelve.
She doesn’t get past twenty-nine. Children rarely get stuck on twenty-eight or
twenty-five, but very commonly stop counting at twenty-nine, because the structure
has run out and requires a new word that you cannot guess: thirty. Here, children
learning to count in some other languages—such as Japanese—have an advantage over
children learning English, French, or Spanish. If you know that ten-nine is followed by
two-tens, two-tens-one, and so on, you might be able to guess that two-tens-nine is
followed by three-tens. But the transition from nineteen to twenty doesn’t really help
you know that twenty-nine is followed by thirty. You might guess twenty-ten, twenty-
eleven, and so on, and often children do count this way. At the moment captured in the
video, Tabitha did not. She seemed to know that numbers don’t end at twenty-nine,
so perhaps she threw a couple more twenties in for good measure before quitting. It
is unlikely that she would count twenty-nine, twenty-three, twenty-eight again if asked
to film the video again the next day, but it is very likely that she would again falter at
twenty-nine.
As a postscript, I am pleased to report that Tabitha is now a teenager, and she counts
fluently without needing remediation anywhere along the way. Her counting errors
documented one day more than ten years ago are a sign of her learning and growth as
a learner, not indications anyone should be concerned.
To summarize, learning the sequence of counting words in your home language
is part of what it means to learn to count. It involves a combination of rote
memorization through exposure and practice, and logical analysis of patterns. All
languages involve some of each; some languages support pattern seeking more
robustly than others.
Being able to recite the number sequence in your home language isn’t all there is
to counting, though. Just as you can memorize a nonsense poem without it having
meaning, so too can you memorize a sequence of counting words and not understand
its relationship to quantities. Another skill you need is recognizing one-to-one
correspondence.
18
ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCE
Before reading this next section, consider taking a moment for an exercise. Look at
Figure 2.5 and do two things. First, count the radishes in the left-hand image. Second,
think about what the photograph on the right might demonstrate. Then read on.
One-to-one correspondence means matching up things from two sets—one from set
A with one from set B. It is why socks come in pairs; why in addition to the one that
goes around your waist, underpants have two holes (and some have three), and why
gloves don’t keep your fingers as warm as mittens. Mittens do not have a one-to-one
correspondence between compartments and your fingers, so your fingers can keep
each other warm. One-to-one correspondence is how a child once claimed they knew
there were five radishes in each half of the radish circle. The child had five fingers, and
matched each finger to one radish. That’s five radishes per half, so ten radishes total.
FIGURE 2.5
How many radishes (left)? Demonstrating a set of five radishes (right). Sadly, the original image I
was sent is lost to time and bad electronic file organization, so I have reproduced the image with
my own much larger and much less adorable hand.
19
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
In each of these examples, the sets consist of physical objects such as fingers, legs,
and radishes. That doesn’t have to be the case. A set might consist of intangible things.
In particular, a set may consist of number words that you say while counting out loud.
In learning to count, you need to learn to say exactly one counting word for each
object; set A is the counting words you say; set B is a bunch of cookies on a plate.
Counting the cookies involves pointing to each cookie in turn, while saying the next
number in the sequence. This requires learning to coordinate multiple challenging
activities, and mistakes are common early on, including:
• Counting and pointing at different rates. One form of this is the smooth sweep where
the child moves their pointer finger at a steady speed while reciting numbers without
coordinating the motion and the recitation.
• Pointing to an object twice—perhaps at the beginning and again at the end of the count.
• Pointing to an object, but not saying a new number. (This is especially common
when working through numbers such as eleven or twenty-seven, which have multiple
syllables in English.)
• Not ever pointing to one of the objects in the set.
A frequent cause of counting troubles is not having a robust system for keeping
track of which objects you’ve counted and which you have not. Putting objects in a
line, touching them, and moving them from one place to another as you count are all
common ways of ensuring a one-to-one correspondence between the counting words
you say and the things you are counting.
Note that a correct count does not mean a lack of one-to-one correspondence errors.
Many a kindergartner has double-counted an object, skipped twenty, and gotten a correct
total of twenty-three objects. The reverse is also true. Children sometimes count with perfect
one-to-one correspondence but skip some number words, and end up with an incorrect total.
Also, you can count correctly but not be able to say how many there are, which brings
us to the third major early counting skill: recognizing cardinality.
20
CARDINALITY
Imagine a preschool teacher and a four-year-old child looking at the photograph in
Figure 2.6.
Teacher: How many oranges are there?

Child: One, two, three, four, five.
Teacher: Good counting! So how many are there?
Child: One, two, three, four, five.
It is entirely reasonable for young children to understand the question How many?
to be a request to count the objects in front of them. Learning that the last number
you say (in this example, five) is different from the others in that it tells you something
about the whole collection of
oranges (that there are five
of them), as well as about the
individual orange you’re pointing
to (it’s the fifth one you counted),
is an impressive achievement.
While the correct answer to the
question “How many oranges?”
is five, a common thing children
have seen and heard occurring
after the question “How many?” is
counting. Many children therefore
first intuit the question “How
many?” to be a social cue to act,
not a request for information.
FIGURE 2.6
How many oranges?
21
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
The fiveness of the set of oranges—together with the fact that this number does
not change when you rearrange them or count them in a different order—is the set’s
cardinality. Along with knowing the counting sequence and maintaining a one-to-one
correspondence as you count, recognizing a set’s cardinality is the third major skill to
make up early counting.
To be clear, it is possible to have any two of these skills and not the third.
• One-to-one correspondence and cardinality. If you—an adult—are learning to count

in an unfamiliar language, you will make mistakes because you have not mastered the
number poem in that language.
• The counting sequence and cardinality. A child may confidently proclaim that there
are six oranges in Figure 2.6 while performing a smooth sweep and correctly reciting
the numbers one through six.
• The counting sequence and one-to-one correspondence. A child may correctly point
to each orange in Figure 2.6 in an organized way, correctly reciting one number each
time, yet not understand that there are five oranges. Each number (one, two, etc.) may
simply act as a name for each orange rather than making a contribution to the child’s
understanding of the set of oranges as a whole.
These skills are challenging and sophisticated. As with all mathematical ideas, they
form the basis of even more sophisticated ideas. For example, once you get good at
counting one-by-one, you become interested in ways to accomplish your goal more
quickly, and more reliably. Making groups—especially of two, five, or ten—is a great way
to achieve both of these ends.
SOME NUMBERS ARE SPECIAL

Math On-A-Stick is a large-scale, creative family math play space that takes place
annually at the Minnesota State Fair. There, we have a very simple math plaything: a
series of twenty-four patio pavers arranged in a winding path lined with wood chips,
about one foot apart from one another. We used leftover house paint to paint each with
22
a number from 0 to 23. We place 0 at an edge of the space and so the path serves to
draw children—and their families behind them—in to play at Math On-A-Stick.
There is a natural progression in the ways young children play on these stepping
stones. They begin at 0 and go one step per stone, counting aloud each number they
land on. Most commonly, on reaching 23, children turn around and go back the way
they came, counting back to 0. This sometimes goes a few rounds, and children are
sometimes pulled away by hungry parents eager to find the Food Building. Often
children persist, and when they do, their play evolves. They start to jump over every
other stone and count by twos. If they start on the 0 stone, the numbers they say are
two, four, six, and so on, ending at twenty-two. Perhaps children are eager to count by
twos, or perhaps they are eager to leap over stones. Either way, the sequence two, four,
six, eight… is a familiar one even to young children, and is an example of skip counting.
Skip counting is a common activity in early elementary classrooms, and a useful one
for building both a sense of number relationships and of connections between additive
and multiplicative thinking (more about those connections coming later in this chapter).
Counting by twos on the stepping stones is compelling because jumping is fun, and
also because counting by twos is the simplest form of skip counting (simple in the sense
of being least complex, which is not to say that it’s easy) as it skips the least possible
number of numbers. Further, our bodies are built with lots of convenient twos.
My friend Chris’s son, Chase, went through a period of being very interested in pairs
of things when he was about fifteen months old. Why pairs? One for each hand. Chase
seemed to attend to the similarity of features such as shape, texture, and function while
ignoring color. A typical morning would see Chase marching around the living room
with a stuffed bunny in one hand, and a stuffed alien in the other. These would soon be
replaced by two differently colored discarded Christmas card envelopes, and then two
metal canning jar rings. On rare occasions, Chase would come across the second stuffed
alien, which his parents had on hand as a backup in case of a toddler emergency, and
these mornings were the lad’s absolute ideal.
It is easy to imagine that Chase was building a strong sense of one-to-one
correspondence (here between hands and stuffed creatures), and also that counting by
twos will be a natural thing for him to think about in the near future.
23
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.7
Counting pennies by twos
Many of us have a physical

sensation attached to two-ness
that has been ingrained through
repetition. Even if we were
not ourselves two-obsessed
toddlers, we have likely counted
a handful of pennies, using two
fingers to push pairs of pennies
from the pile while counting by
twos (Figure 2.7).
Likely, our experience with
fives is a little more cerebral.
While you can use the five fingers on one hand to match with five pennies (as the child
did with radishes in Figure 2.5), the motion is more awkward. Instead, we are probably
familiar with counting by fives because it makes nice language patterns in our number
system.
5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40…
If you read that sequence aloud, you’ll probably fall into a familiar rhythm as you
surpass twenty-five; something DA-da-da DA-da (and contrast this with counting by
sixes, where I can barely make it to thirty-six without having to slow down to work out
what comes next, and where I certainly don’t fall into a rhythm).
Finally, counting by tens takes full advantage of the structure of our number system
by running through each of the new words (ten, twenty, thirty, and so on) required
for the decades, but skipping over all the units in between. If you have a large number
of objects to count, making piles of ten is a great strategy for efficiency. Checking
that a pile of ten actually has ten objects (and not nine or eleven) is a bit tedious, so
24
sometimes you might choose to make piles of five and pair them—verifying that a pile
of five is actually five is at the edge of most people’s subitizing powers, and verifying
that each pair of piles is actually a pair (not a singleton or a triple) is certainly possible
at a glance. In short, groups of two, five, or ten are common and convenient extensions
of the ideas of number language, one-to-one correspondence, and cardinality, and for
many children, they are the among the first ideas they encounter about the various
ways that numbers are structured.
NUMBER STRUCTURE
Another favorite plaything at Math On-A-Stick is a Pattern Machine—a mechanical toy
consisting of nine rows of nine buttons; each of which works like the clicky end of a
ballpoint pen. Press once to pop it up; press again to pop it down (Figure 2.8). Pattern
Machines are adapted from a
commercial product designed for
memorizing multiplication facts,
but we modify them by covering
the facts to create a well-
structured plaything for children.
As an exercise, consider trying
to determine whether there are
more buttons popped up or
down in Figure 2.8. Remarkably,
children are often able to
determine this without knowing
how many buttons are up or
down—that is, without counting.
I’ll share a typical argument at
the end of this section.
FIGURE 2.8
A Pattern Machine
25
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.9
Scattered coins
When young children first

play with Pattern Machines,
they usually have one of two
goals: get all the buttons up,
or get all of them down. On
achieving one of these goals,
they immediately and almost
invariably take on the other.
If you observe closely how
they work toward these goals,
you’ll notice that they are not
systematic in their choice of
which button to press next. It
is as though a Pattern Machine
looks the same to them as a
collection of coins scattered on
the ground (Figure 2.9).
The coins are unstructured—haphazardly arranged based on chance—and so too
are the buttons to a young child first encountering a Pattern Machine. But if that
child persists, perhaps pulling up a seat, getting comfortable, and concentrating
on the task at hand, within a few minutes they will likely begin clicking the buttons
in rows or in columns, or sometimes spiraling around from the outside in. When it
happens, this shift signals that the child has noticed the structure of the Pattern
Machine; that they have begun to see the rows and columns, and are now using this
structure in service of their goals, or even to invent new goals such as alternating
rows of up- and down-buttons. By contrast, there is no deeper structure to be found
in the scattered coins.
26
FIGURE 2.10
Alternating rows on a Pattern
Machine
When a child starts making

a pattern of alternating rows
on a Pattern Machine (Figure
2.10), we not only see that they
see structure on the machine,
we also have evidence that
they’re thinking about a row
as a unit. “This row is up; that
row is down.” A shift from
individual buttons as units to
composed units of rows or
columns of buttons, then, is not
just a change in how they see
the geometry of the buttons;
it is a change in how the child
perceives quantities. The
interplay between geometry and numbers runs deep in mathematics. Mathematicians
talk about square and triangular numbers; hexagonal numbers, even! Math teacher Fawn
Nguyen has a lovely website called Visual Patterns (https://www.visualpatterns.org/)
where she maintains a large collection of geometric arrangements of objects, together
with teacher moves for connecting the images to counting and algebra.
If the child calls it a “row,” that is strong evidence of seeing the unit, but children
frequently understand things they don’t express in formal language, and they might not
express things they understand in any language at all! Vague language such as “this
one has five,” gestures, or even just the order in which children take actions or arrange
objects can all be indications of seeing new units.
27
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Even if a child doesn’t know (or care) that there are eighty-one buttons on a Pattern
Machine, they know that there are many buttons. They know that there is some number
that describes how many there are. Even if they don’t know (or care) how many rows
there are, or how many buttons are in each row, they have learned that the buttons are in
groups. The difference between a collection of individual things and a collection of groups
is an important part of the difference between additive and multiplicative thinking.
The idea that a group can be a single thing is an element of structure that runs
through place value (where we are concerned with groups of ten, groups of ten tens,
and so on), fractions (where we can think of half or three-quarters of a group), and they
are essential to the meaning of multiplication.
Coming back to the exercise I suggested for Figure 2.8, children often notice that
the top row has five up-buttons and four down-buttons, while the second row has four
up-buttons and five down-buttons. That is, the top row has an extra up while the second
row has an extra down. Together these two rows have the same number of ups and
downs. You can make four pairs of rows like that, and then the bottom row has an extra
up-button without a corresponding next row to have an extra down. Therefore, there is
one extra up-button on the whole machine.
A Word About Standard Algorithms

In the United States, children have generally been taught a single algorithm (or set
of steps) for computing sums, another one for computing differences, and so on for
products and quotients. These algorithms are so ubiquitous and standardized that
phrases such as “carry the one” or “you have to borrow from the tens” bring back
memories for adults who may not have set foot in a school for decades.
These algorithms are often called “standard algorithms” to distinguish them
from other techniques for computation. Importantly, any standard algorithm is only
standard to a particular time and place. People have devised many schemes for
precise computations. There are addition and subtraction algorithms that have you
compute from left to right instead of right to left. The lattice algorithm for multiplication
appears in some American curricula and dates back at least as far as the seventeenth
century, when John Napier developed a tool (“Napier’s Bones”) for computing with
28
this algorithm. There are algorithms with colorful names, such as the Russian Peasant
Algorithm, which is a multiplication algorithm. There is even an algorithm that used to
be standard in the United States, but has not been regularly included in curricula for a
long time—an algorithm for extracting square roots.
All of this is to say that the term “standard algorithm” is much more nebulous than
it might seem if the American standard algorithms are the only ones you’ve ever had a
chance to learn. In what follows, I’ll use the terms “standard algorithm” and “standard
American algorithm” interchangeably, on the assumption that these are algorithms
familiar to most readers. If anything about these algorithms is unfamiliar or long-
forgotten, you’ll find lots of resources with a quick internet search. The same is true if
all this talk of alternative algorithms has you interested in expanding your repertoire of
computation methods.
Addition and Multiplication

Structure
As an exercise, count the eggs in
Figure 2.11, and pay attention to
how you count them. Then read
on.
Counting by ones or by
twos or by fives or by tens is
using the additive structure of
numbers, while counting groups
of two, five, or ten is using
the multiplicative structure of
numbers. Consider the large
tray of eggs in Figure 2.11. You
might count “5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30,”
FIGURE 2.11
Eggs
29
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
adding five eggs for each column as you move from left to right. Each number you recite
is a number of eggs, and so you are using the additive structure of numbers. If instead
you count the columns “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,” and think “six groups of five, which is thirty,” then
you are using the multiplicative structure of numbers. In this second count, the numbers
name groups of eggs, and there is no running tally of the number of eggs. (Sometimes,
you will hear children doing a kind of intermediate count, saying “one” for the row, then
“five” for the number of eggs so far. “two… 10, three… 15, four… 20, five… 25, six… 30.”)
At its heart, multiplication is about some number of same-sized groups. While
mathematicians have several of ways of talking about multiplication, this one is simple
enough for young children to make sense of, and robust enough to extend through
most of high school algebra and calculus.
In this sense, A x B means A groups of B. 3 x 5 is three groups of five; 6 x 9 is six groups
of nine. Alternatively, you can use the same idea a bit differently and say that A x B means
groups of A, B times. This would mean that 3 x 5 is five groups of three. The former
structure is more common in American school curriculum, so I’ll use it as the initial meaning
for multiplication. What’s important is that the two meanings share the structure of groups.
A groups of B captures one way in which multiplicative thinking is more sophisticated
than additive thinking. In the expression 3 x 6, three and six have different meanings.
There are three groups and six objects in each group. Let’s say we’re counting the eggs
in Figure 2.12.
Three rows of six eggs is
eighteen whats? Colloquially,
you cannot add apples to
oranges, but evidently you can
multiply rows by eggs. The
result is eggs; what happened to
the rows?
FIGURE 2.12
Eighteen eggs
30
A conversation a few years back helped me to notice something new. When you
count the rows and the eggs in each row, you might count across the bottom row
from left to right, and then up the left-hand side. To a novice (say, a kindergartner),
it may appear as though you are counting the lower-left egg twice. As an exercise
before reading on, consider answering that novice’s question, “Why did you count that
lower-left egg twice?”
To the extent that pointing and saying a number is counting, you sort of are counting
that egg twice, but really, you’re counting different things each time. On the first pass,
that egg is an egg, and it’s being counted as one of several in its row. On the second
pass, that egg stands in for a row, one of several in the carton. Now imagine a towering
stack of egg cartons. You might count that same egg a third time, as the representative
of its carton, one of several in
the stack (Figure 2.13).
What is going on here is
abstraction—an egg isn’t always
an egg. Sometimes an egg
is an egg—this is concrete.
Sometimes an egg stands for
something else: a row of eggs,
or a carton—this is abstract.
Making that act of abstraction
explicit by saying something
such as “Now we’ll count the
rows,” or by gesturing along
the rows as you count them is a
great way to support children in
learning to commit such acts of
abstraction for themselves.
FIGURE 2.13
A palette of eggs
31
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
As for what happens to the rows when you multiply three rows by six eggs, it’s not
really rows times eggs. You’re multiplying three rows and six eggs per row. “Eggs
per row” is a unit rate, like miles per hour or liters per flush. Unit rates serve as a
kind of intermediary between different units in multiplication situations. In effect, A
groups of B objects per group is C objects is a more detailed view of our meaning
of multiplication. Note that there are three units: groups, objects, and objects per
group.
Children bring lots of expertise about unit rates to the classroom. This expertise is
likely to be diverse in most classrooms because it is embedded in culture. Eggs per
row, points per basket, wheels per vehicle, stitches per inch, etc. Anywhere children
encounter unit rates, the multiplication structure of numbers is lurking. As educators, we
can draw these examples out of students—both to share their knowledge and to help
them look for more examples of this mathematics in their everyday lives. As parents
or other outside-of-school caregivers, we can talk and wonder about how/whether/
when unit rates scale. (I can walk a mile in 20 minutes; can I really walk 100 miles in
2,000 minutes?) or whether there are exceptions (do all egg cartons have six eggs per
row? Is a basket always worth two points?).
The idea of A groups of B extends to fractions with a little bit of work. 21 × 7 means
half of a group of seven, which is 3 21 . 4 × 43 means four groups of 43 . It feels a little strange
to talk about “groups” that are smaller than one. A useful generalization of “group” is
“unit”—both group and unit can be the thing you’re counting by. Four units, each is 43 , is
another way of interpreting four groups of 43 .
In this view, a unit is anything you consider to be one. I can get 1 21 cups of flour by
using my 43 cup measure twice (Figure 2.14). 2 × 43 = 1 21 means “two 43 -cup measures is
1 21 cups” or “two groups of 43 of a cup is 1 21 cups.” In this case, the 43 -cup measure is
serving as a unit. “I’ll use two of these,” you might say to your baking companion,
causing no confusion in referring the 43 -cup measure as one.
Besides the A groups of B meaning of multiplication, a different idea is that
multiplication is repeated addition. In this interpretation, 3 × 5 means 5 + 5 + 5, and
6 × 9 means 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9. This isn’t a wrong idea, and indeed repeated addition
is often helpful in solving multiplication problems or noticing patterns. But defining
32
FIGURE 2.14
Measuring cup
multiplication in terms of
addition focuses on the
procedure for calculating
a product rather than on
the underlying structure.
Multiplication isn’t a shorthand
way of writing particular
kinds of addition problems; it
is instead a powerful way of
structuring numbers—a way
different from addition.
When children count the eggs
in Figure 2.11 by fives, we don’t
know for sure whether they are
thinking about multiplication per
se. We don’t know that they see
a special structure of six groups
of five. As teachers, we can support students making that connection in a number of
ways, such as using language like six groups of five, pairing that language with notation
such as 6 × 5, and by asking whether they remember from one day to the next how
many objects there are altogether in six groups of five.
As a quick illustration of the richness of elementary mathematics, I’ll tell you about
another meaning for multiplication. If you have three pairs of pants and two shirts as
in Figure 2.15, you can mix and match to end up with several outfits (perhaps not all
of them in good taste or matching, of course). As an exercise, consider counting how
many outfits you can make this way.
One way to count these outfits is to make a list of them. If you label the pants P, Q,
and R, and the shirts S and T, then you can write (P, S) to represent an outfit with the
33
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.15
Outfits
first pair of pants and the first

shirt. Here is a full list of outfits
written that way. The columns
are outfits with the same shirt;
the rows are outfits with the
same pair of pants:
(P,S) (P,T)
(Q,S) (Q,T)
(R,S) (R,T)
Organizing the outfits in a 3-by-2 array like this highlights the connection to A
groups of B as a meaning for multiplication. In this case, the original structure of
the units works differently. Three is the number of pairs of pants, and two is the
number of shirts. Neither is a number of groups. From a practical perspective, you
cannot make all six outfits at once. You have to imagine them. You can dress yourself
six separate times, but you cannot dress six people at once with this collection of
clothing items.
Mathematicians call this view of multiplication the Cartesian product of two sets. The
Fundamental Counting Principle summarizes that the size of the Cartesian product is the
product of the sizes of the two sets. Three pairs of pants and two shirts make six outfits,
and more generally, A pairs of pants and B shirts make A × B outfits. This is a more
abstract notion of multiplication than counting eggs in a carton. When you’re counting
eggs, the eggs are there in front of you. When you’re counting outfits, you cannot
actually make all six outfits at once; you have to imagine outfits that do not currently
exist in your world.
Recall that counting means any work you do to figure out how many there are
(or could be!). We began with the underlying skills of knowing number language,
34
understanding the importance of one-to-one correspondence, and understanding

cardinality. We have moved through addition and multiplication as increasingly
sophisticated strategies for counting.
Once we think about multiplication on its own terms—as a second operation distinct
from addition—we can ask how it is like or unlike addition, and we can consider what
relationships exist between the two operations. After discussing notation, that is what
we’ll consider next.
A Note on Notation
There are several ways of indicating multiplication. The standard in elementary school
mathematics is an x. 3 x 4 means “three times four” or “three multiplied by four” or “the
product of three and four."
In algebra, mathematicians tend to use the letter x as a variable, which would make
3 x x a confusing thing to look at. Whether for this reason or others, when possible,
mathematicians tend to omit the multiplication symbol altogether. 3x means “three times x”
or “three multiplied by x” or “the product of three and x." We usually read it as “three-ex.”
Finally, omitting multiplication symbols means we can’t tell the difference between
“three multiplied by four” and “thirty-four”—both would be 34. So, when you want to
show the multiplication of two numbers, you need a symbol. Ideally that symbol isn’t the
letter x (because that’s a variable now). That is what a raised dot is for: 3 • 4.
In the remainder of this Teacher’s Guide, these three ways of showing multiplication
will be interchangeable. Generally, I’ll use x more often for purely arithmetic ideas,
• more often when I want to emphasize the operation of multiplication, and omit
multiplication symbols altogether when the ideas are purely algebraic.
The Commutative Property

Addition and multiplication are commutative operations, which means that it doesn’t
matter whether I add three to two, or two to three—the result is the same: 3 + 2 = 2 + 3 = 5.
Likewise, six groups of nine is the same quantity as nine groups of six, and, more generally,
this applies to all numbers (there is nothing special about two, three, six, or nine in any of
these statements). The equations A + B = B + A and A • B = B • A express that generality.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
The idea of commutativity is important for young children, but the name is
not. Some classrooms refer to the “rearrangement principle,” others use invented
terminology such as “turnaround facts,” and some use “commutative." However
you refer to it, helping students notice that you can rearrange the terms of a sum,
or the factors of a product, ensures that they have a powerful problem-solving
strategy.
Here are a few sums and products that may become easier for many of us to do in
our heads if we remember that addition and multiplication are commutative. As an
exercise, consider changing the order of the numbers in each row and thinking about
how that might change the way somebody might perform the calculations. I’ll suggest
possibilities at the end of this section.
4 + 56
68 + 117 + (−68)
5 × 14
 1
4 × 17 ×  
4
In mathematics, there is a difference between something that is sometimes true, and

something that is always true. 3x + 2 = 17 is sometimes true. When x = 5, it is true. When
x equals anything else, it is false. A − B = B − A is sometimes true. Whenever A = B, both
differences are zero. If A and B are unequal—say A = 7 and B = 5—then A − B is the
opposite of B − A. In this example, A − B = 2, but B − A = −2. Unlike addition, the order
of the numbers you subtract matters. Subtraction is not commutative. The equations
expressing the commutative property of addition, and of multiplication are always true.
But how can you know this?
The key to answering that question is attending to the ways in which the operation is
special, rather than on the ways in which the numbers are special. Diagrams are helpful
for building such an argument.
36
If you think of 3 + 4 as combining a set of three and a set of four, then a diagram for
3 + 4 might look like this:
XXX XXXX
Rotate that diagram 180°, and you have
XXXX XXX
This second diagram is 4 + 3. The order that the two sets come in doesn’t matter. There
is nothing special about 4 and 3, or even about these being whole numbers. Instead, it’s
the fact that I’m combining the sets that matters. There are reasonable questions about
whether this argument extends to negative numbers, or to irrational numbers (such as
the square root of two, or pi), where representing a number with Xs is non-intuitive (or
maybe even impossible). But those are questions we can save for later. A diagram such
as the one above provides a basis for thinking about the structure of the operation of
addition, which is a big step forward for lots of young mathematicians.
By contrast, a diagram for 7 − 4 might look like this:
OOOXXXX
One interpretation is that there were seven circles, but we crossed out four of them.
With that interpretation, 4 − 7 would mean there were four circles, but we crossed out
seven of them. This is a very different situation from the previous one—how do you
cross out circles that don’t exist? If you spin the 7 − 4 diagram 180°, you end up this:
XXXXOOO
This new diagram is still seven circles with four crossed out. It still represents 7 − 4,
not 4 – 7. Subtraction behaves differently from addition in this way. I’ll say more about
subtraction and the commutative property a bit later on, when discussing division,
which is similarly non-commutative. But first, let’s consider multiplication.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.16
An array. Four rows of three.
For multiplication, the situation is a bit more

sophisticated than for addition. If 4 x 3 means
four groups of three, then we can represent
that with an array (Figure 2.16).
In this case, the groups are rows—four
rows of three. But the array allows us
to regroup right away and see the same
diagram as three columns of four. Here
too, the focus turns to the structure of
multiplication—the groups—and away from
the particular numbers. Again, there was
nothing special about four and three. Instead
the special thing is the rows and columns;
the structure of the operation. If instead
you want to always count rows, you can
rotate your array 90° (Figure 2.17). In this
case, A rows of B becomes B rows of A.
If you switch from counters to squares, and allow the squares to be cut into fractional
pieces, then you end up with an area model (Figure 2.18). In an area model, the factors
are side lengths rather than counts of rows, columns, or counters, and the product is
the area. Area models are useful in many mathematical contexts, including multidigit
arithmetic, algebra, and calculus (Figure 2.19). All of this is to say that arrays are simple
but useful structures that support sophisticated mathematical thinking.
Arrays support learning about multiplication structure with whole numbers, while
area models support the same with fractions, decimals, and mixed numbers. There
remain important questions about irrational and negative numbers. What does it
mean—really—to have a side length of square-root-of-2? What do you get if you
multiply two negative numbers? To address these questions seriously requires digging
38
FIGURE 2.17
The same array, rotated to become
three rows of four.
deeper into other aspects

of these numbers, and the
behavior of multiplication. Most
of the time, we don’t need to
worry about the precise value
of √2; we either consider an
approximate value (such as
1.414), or its defining property
(it is the side length of a square
whose exact area is 2 square
units). What does it mean when
I’m multiplying √2 by √3 though? This is a question that mathematics and philosophy
had to wrestle with for a long time.
Similarly, multiplying two negative numbers doesn’t resolve simply through arrays
or area models. How can I have negative groups, or negative groups of negative
things? The answer to this question lies in the structure of the distributive property of
multiplication over addition, and I’ll examine that in a later section.
FIGURE 2.18
Area models for twelve showing three rows of four (left) and one-and-a-half rows of eight (right).
39
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.19
Area shows up in many places! Fractions (left), the Pythagorean Theorem (center), and calculus
(right).
We saw a little ways back that not all operations are commutative; 3 – 2 does not equal
2 – 3. Similarly, division is not commutative. 12 ÷ 4 = 3, but 4 ÷ 12 = 31 . To summarize, addition
and multiplication are each commutative operations, which is a formal way of saying what
many children notice on their own—that it doesn’t matter in which order you put two
numbers you’re going to add (or multiply); the sum (or product) will be the same either way.
In order to notice the importance of a property such as the commutative property,
it is often helpful to see that not everything has that property. Subtraction and division
have in common that they are not commutative, just as addition and multiplication have
in common that they are.
It is inconvenient that subtraction and division are not commutative operations. There
is a workaround, however. If you think of 7 − 4 not as a subtraction problem, but an
addition problem involving a negative number, you’ll have 7 + −4. You can rewrite that
as −4 + 7 because addition is commutative. The same thing is true for division, but you
need to rewrite as the reciprocal rather than the opposite. 12 ÷ 4 becomes 12 • ( 41 ). You
can rewrite that as ( 41 ) • 12 because multiplication is commutative.
As teachers, we don’t have to rely on children noticing the commutative property on
their own, though. We can help them to notice it, to investigate it, and to use it in their
own mathematical work. If children see five groups of six in Figure 2.11, you can ask if
40
anyone sees six groups of five, and you can even wonder aloud whether you will always
be able to find B groups of A whenever you see A groups of B. While the commutative
property of multiplication is about the order of two factors, another property is about
the order of two operations. If I’m multiplying twice, say 3 • 4 • 5, does it matter whether
I do the first multiplication first or the second one? The answer to that question is
summarized in the associative property, which is the next topic.
But first, I promised earlier in this section to share some ways of thinking that might
emerge by rearranging numbers in some sums and products. Here goes…
4 + 56 can become 56 + 4, and now I go a short distance from fifty-six rather than a
long distance from four (or add a few things to a large collection, rather than adding a
whole bunch of things to a small collection).
68 + 117 + (−68) can become 68 + (−68) + 117. If I know that a number and its opposite
add to zero, then I only have to add zero to 117.
5 × 14 can become 14 × 5. If I’m thinking about five groups of fourteen, I might try to
count by fourteens. Thinking about fourteen groups of five allows me to count by fives,
or even (to preview the next section on the associative property) to notice that fourteen
groups of five is the same as seven groups of ten.
Finally, 4 × 17 × ( 41 ) can become 4 × ( 41 ) × 17, which is just like the trick for 68 up above,
only now we’re multiplying by one instead of adding zero.
The Associative Property

If you have ever thought about 9 + 8 as 1 more than 8 + 8, or added 25 + 15 by adding
10 first to get 35, then 5 more to get 40, or even if you have ever used the standard
algorithm for adding multidigit numbers (Figure 2.20), then you have—perhaps
subconsciously—used the associative property of addition.
In its general form, the associative property of addition looks like this:
(A + B) + C = A + (B + C)
In the case of my 9 + 8 example, that looks like this:
(1 + 8) + 8 = 1 + (8 + 8)
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
If you—as many children do—happen to know your doubles facts (3 + 3, 4 + 4, etc.),

then the expression on the right-hand side is easier to know directly than the one on the
left-hand side, and the associative property of addition assures us that they are equal.
Things are similar in the 25 + 15 case.
25 + (10 + 5) = (25 + 10) + 5
Adding 10 to 25, and then adding 5, gives the same result as adding 15 straightaway.
As a final example, consider 37 + 45. As an exercise, perform this sum with pencil and
paper, keeping track of the steps you take along the way, even if they don’t result in
marks on the paper.
In the standard (American) addition algorithm, you would add the ones digits of the
two numbers first. Here, that means doing 7 + 5 and getting 12. This works because of
the associative property:
(30 + 7) + 5 + 40 = 30 + (7 + 5) + 40
The commutative property of addition lets us rewrite this last expression as
30 + 40 + (7 + 5)
In the standard algorithm, you would add 7 + 5 to get 12, write the 2 and “carry the one.”
That is a very cleverly disguised instance of the associative property of addition.
(30 + 40) + 12 = (30 + 40) + (10 + 2)

= (30 + 40 + 10) + 2
Finally, you may just know that 30 + 40 is 70, or you may think about 3 tens + 4 tens =
7 tens, which is an example of the distributive property (which I’ll discuss shortly),
and then one more ten is 8 tens, or 80. But if you’re following the steps of the
42
standard algorithm more tightly, you’re rewriting that last expression above using the
commutative property of addition.
(30 + 40 + 10) + 2 = (10 + 30 + 40) + 2

= ( 10 + 30) + 40 + 2
= 40 + 40 + 2
= 80 + 2
= 82
The standard algorithm works

because addition is associative
and commutative. And because
of our decimal place value
system; imagine trying to do the
same thing with Roman numerals!
When you get to V + V = X, do
you write the X or carry it? The
point is that while addition is still
associative in Roman numerals,
you need a different algorithm to
work with numbers in this than
the standard algorithm that most
American students are familiar
with, which depends on our place
value number system.
FIGURE 2.20
Adding 37 and 45 with the standard
American algorithm.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Multiplication is also associative.
(A × B) × C = A × (B × C)
Recall the shoe rack from Chapter 1 (Figure 1.3). In that example, you might count the
24 shoes as 4 groups of (3 pairs), or (4 groups of 3) pairs, so
4 × (3 × 2) = (4 × 3) × 2
In this example the unit “pairs” disguises the third factor in the multiplication. If I want to
count individual shoes, I can count the pairs and then double, or I can count the shoes
directly. X pairs of shoes will always be the same number as 2X shoes.
In that sense, the associative property of multiplication is a formal way of saying that you
can count things individually or bundled into groups; you’ll get the same total either way.
4 groups of (3 pairs) suggests 4 groups of 6 shoes—the shoes are unbundled while I
count them. (4 groups of 3) pairs suggests 12 pairs—the shoes are bundled until I finish
up the count; it’s 24 shoes either way.
More importantly, the associative property means that this bundling and unbundling
idea is true of any size groups, not just for pairs of shoes.
One of the top ten most important groups in our number system is a group of ten.
Why does twenty have a two in it? Because twenty consists of two groups of ten, and
this leads us to an answer to the question, “When I’m multiplying by a multiple of ten—
such as 3 × 40—why can I ignore the zero, and then stick it back on at the end?”
Three groups of forty is three groups of (4 tens). Because we’ve studied pairs of
shoes in great depth, we know we can write this as (3 groups of 4) tens, which is 12 tens,
and 12 tens is 120.
Let’s linger a moment to ensure that there’s no magic here—just various ways of
thinking about the numbers.
3 groups of 40 = 3 groups of (4 tens)
This shift in thinking is when you “ignore the zero.” Don’t think of it as 40 ones for right
now, think of it as 4 tens—same number, but differently grouped.
3 groups of (4 tens) = (3 groups of 4) tens
44
Now this is counting the bundles. How many tens do I have?

12 tens = 120 is unbundling, made deceptively simple by the structure of our number
system, in which 10 tens is 100, so 12 tens is 120.
Besides ten, two is another number that children often enjoy using as a multiplier.
When my son was eight years old, I was teaching College Algebra and trying to
understand my students’ struggles with exponents. I had an idea for exploring common
intuitions about related ideas, so I asked Griffin to think about “doubling” with me.
After obtaining his consent for a quick math conversation, I asked him to start with
five and double it. “Ten,” was his easy response and I asked him to double it again.
“20, then 40, 80, 160… 2… no… 320, 640, 1280…”
I expressed my surprise at the length of this list of doublings, but he wasn’t quite done.
“Then two-thousand… five-hundred… sixty.”
Again, I expressed my surprise, and he replied, “Yeah. That’s all I can do, though. I can’t
think of what comes next.” We had confirmed that the idea of doubling was one that
Griffin had well in hand before knowing anything about exponents. The point of this
story here is not anything to do with exponents, but instead that being able to double
numbers is a common skill that children develop as they explore arithmetic.
At first glance, this may seem like a skill with limited utility. After all, a relatively small
percentage of multiplication problems we meet in our lifetimes have two as one of their
two factors. But if you also develop an intuition for the kinds of unit switching that the
associative property captures, doubling numbers becomes powerful for lots of mental
arithmetic. Consider a product such as 35 × 16. As an exercise, you might compute this
product with paper and pencil before reading further. If you do, pay attention to the
steps you take along the way, even if those steps don’t result in marks on the paper.
The standard algorithm for multiplication (Figure 2.21) breaks both numbers up by
place value; regardless of what the tens digit is for either number, you would multiply
5 × 6 as the first step.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.21
Multiplying 35 and 16 using the
standard algorithm.
If instead of seeing 16 as 10 +
6, you see 16 as two eights, you
can write:
35 × (2 × 8) = (35 × 2) × 8 = 70 × 8
That is, you can double thirty-

five, and multiply that new
product by eight. Now, eight is
two fours, so:
70 × (2 × 4) = (70 × 2) × 4
Continue doubling and you’ll

have:
140 × (2 × 2) = (140 × 2) × 2
= 280 × 2
= 560
Many children invent such strategies, and they have no idea that these strategies
are examples of the associative property of multiplication. As teachers supporting our
students’ learning, we can be more prepared by knowing that these strategies always
work (because the associative property of multiplication is true for all numbers), and
by supporting students in finding connections among groupings, working with tens,
doubling, and beyond.
46
Before we turn our attention away from the associative property of multiplication,
here are a few more products with useful ways of re-associating the underlying factors.
14 × 35 = (7 × 2) × (5 × 7)
= 7 × (2 × 5) × 7
29 × 40 = 29 × (2 × 2 × 10)
= (29 × 2) × (2 × 10)
= (58) × (2 × 10)
= (58 × 2) × 10
379 × 0.2 = 379 × (2 tenths)
= (379 × 2) tenths
Like the commutative property, the associative property is an important aspect of

additive structure, and also of multiplicative structure. The distributive property, by
contrast, is about the relationship between addition and multiplication.
The Distributive Property

The distributive property of multiplication over addition is like the fuel injectors of
arithmetic and algebra. With fuel injectors, most people are vaguely aware that they
exist, that they are part of an engine, and that a modern car won’t run without them. At
the same time, most people probably cannot provide much detail about exactly where
to find fuel injectors, nor precisely how they work. So it is with the distributive property.
For most people, distributive property is a phrase they’ve heard a few times, but not a
thing they think about, even as they do a calculation on a piece of scrap paper, or do
some mental arithmetic that relies on this property.
Multidigit multiplication is probably most children’s first formal encounter with the
distributive property, but children have intuitions about it that develop much earlier.
When my daughter was seven, I asked her to draw me three rows of five dots. She did,
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
and she knew there were fifteen, probably by counting by fives. I asked, “What if it had
been three rows of six dots instead?” She thought about each row having one additional
dot, so there are three more dots than before—eighteen altogether.
That relationship is what the distributive property formalizes. 3 x 6 is the same as 3 x
5 + 3 x 1. In algebraic symbols, that looks like this:
a • (b + c) = a • b + a • c(1)
(b + c) • a = b • a + c • a(2)
If we’re thinking about A groups of B, then equation (1) is how Tabitha was thinking:
three groups of six is the same as three groups of five, plus three groups of one. If
instead she and I had started with two rows of six, then she would likely have thought
in the style of equation (2): three groups of six is the same as two groups of six plus one
group of six (Figure 2.22).
The distributive property makes multiplication algorithms work. Consider 43 x 12. As
an exercise, compute this product with paper and pencil before reading on. Figure 2.23
shows what my paper looks like after finding this product with the standard algorithm.
FIGURE 2.22
Three groups of six is the same as two groups of six, plus one more.
48
FIGURE 2.23
Multiplying 43 and 12 with the standard
algorithm.
In Figure 2.23, there are two partial

products that I added to determine
the final product: 86 and 430. 86 is
the product of 43 and 2, while 430 is
the product of 43 and 10. Using the
structure of the distributive property,
that looks like this:
43 • (10 + 2) = 43 • 10 + 43 • 2
If I use a different algorithm, I’ll get

different ways to carve this product
into pieces, and maybe different
ways of representing the pieces.
An algorithm often called partial
products looks like Figure 2.24.
The story here is a little more complicated, but still depends on the distributive
property. If you start with the same equivalence as before:
43 • (10 + 2) = 43 • 10 + 43 • 2
Now each of the expressions on the right-hand side is a product that we can rewrite.
43 • 10 + 43 • 2 = (40 + 3) • 10 + (40 + 3) • 2
= (40 • 10) + (3 • 10) + (40 • 2) + (3 • 2)
= 400 + 30 + 80 + 6
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.24
Multiplying 43 and 12 with the
partial products algorithm.
These four numbers match

the partial products in my
algorithm. For simplicity, I chose
numbers that would not require
carrying (regrouping), as these
finer details are not important
to the thrust of the argument
here. My claim is that Tabitha’s
informal work with dots uses
the same ideas as those
that underlie multiplication
algorithms. So whether your
students want to be professional
mathematicians or just citizens
able to use numbers in their
lives and work, opportunities
you offer them to notice and use the distributive property will pay off in the long run.
The grapes photo in How Did You Count? is a great opportunity to notice the
distributive property (Figure 2.25). There are twenty-four green grapes and thirty-six
red grapes, so sixty grapes total. Another common way to see the grapes is to notice
that there are six groups of each type of grape. You can combine each bunch of red
grapes with a bunch of green ones. That leaves six groups of ten grapes each. You can
write that this way:
6 • 4 + 6 • 6 = 6 • (4 + 6)
That last statement is an example of the distributive property of multiplication over

addition.
50
FIGURE 2.25
The distributive property of grapes.
Finally, the distributive

property is the reason that
two negative numbers multiply
to give a positive product.
Mathematicians often find it
useful to think abstractly about
multiplication—not so much
as A groups of B things, but
instead as an operation that
distributes over addition. As a
mathematical community, we
have agreed that this should
be true for all numbers, and
so should the commutative
and associative properties of
addition and multiplication, as
well as the special properties of
zero (e.g. that zero times anything equals zero because you either have zero groups or
zero things in each group).
If you put all of those things together, you can evaluate an expression such as this in
two ways:
(4 + −4) • (−5)
On the one hand, 4 + −4 is zero, so the whole expression is zero.

On the other hand, the distributive property tells us that it is also equal to 4 · (−5) + −4 ·
(−5). The first part of that is four groups of −5, which is −20. Equating these tells us that:
−20 + (−4)(−5) = 0
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
And so the product of −4 and −5 must be positive 20. The two negative numbers
(−4 and −5) aren’t special in any way, so the same argument applies to all negative
numbers.
The commutative, associative, and distributive properties are ideas that children
first encounter in the context of specific computations or relationships, such as that
five rows of six eggs is the same as six columns of five eggs. As children move toward
claiming that changing the order of two factors always gives the same product, and as
they begin to justify why this must be so, they are moving from arithmetic to algebra.
ALGEBRA
There are several ways to think about what algebra is. You can think of algebra as a
set of procedures for figuring out unknown values. Another way is to think of algebra
as generalized arithmetic. 1 + 2 = 2 + 1 is a truth about the relationship between the
numbers 1 and 2, whereas a + b = b + a is a statement about the relationship between all
pairs of numbers. This idea of making statements about all cases is what mathematicians
mean by generality or generalizing.
In this view, algebra is the result of studying the relationships among numbers
without worrying about any specific numbers in particular. For example, is an odd
number times an odd number always odd? Arithmetic can offer lots of examples, such
as those below.
3 × 5 = 15
101 × 7 = 707
If I check enough examples, I might be pretty sure that two odd factors will always
give an odd product. Algebra allows us to consider all odd numbers at once. Let’s
see what that looks like, and how the algebra depends on the number and operation
properties of arithmetic we’ve discussed in this chapter.
Start with even numbers. An even number is a product of two and some other whole
number. Six is either two groups of three (2 · 3) or three groups of two (3 · 2). One
hundred is 2 · 50, which because of the commutative property of multiplication you
52
can think of as either two groups of fifty or fifty groups of two. If you want to think
about even numbers in general, you can write 2m, where m stands for a whole number.
Think of m as some number of pairs of shoes; then 2m is the number of shoes. When
mathematicians write something like 2m, we’re thinking about 2m as an even number,
and also about 2m as all even numbers. This is a lot like the abstraction that children
have to make in order to think about ten as simultaneously one group and ten individual
things.
Whole numbers that are not even are odd, and those are the numbers that come in
between the even numbers. If you have an even number, you can get an odd number
by adding one. Therefore, we can refer to all odd numbers with the expression 2m + 1,
where m is still a whole number. In the language of shoes, you have m pairs of shoes,
plus an extra shoe. Seven is 2 · 3 + 1, 1041 is 2 · 520 + 1. If you want to think about two
odd numbers without worrying about what those odd numbers are specifically, you can
write the second one as 2n + 1. Maybe we have an odd number of rows of shoes. You
can count (2n + 1) rows of (2m + 1) shoes in each row with the product
(2n + 1) • (2m + 1)
An area model (Figure 2.26) shows this multiplication.

We can remove some of the partitions so that there are four parts (Figure 2.27).
Adding these four parts together (because that’s how area works):
(2m • 2n) + (2m • 1) + (2n • 1) + (1 • 1)
The distributive property applies to

the first three parts (and 1 · 1 = 1):
2 • ((m • 2n) + (m • 1) + (n • 1)) + 1
FIGURE 2.26
Area model
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.27
Area model, relabeled
Because n and m are whole numbers, and because they are being added and
multiplied, that complicated thing in parentheses— ((m · 2n) + (m · 1) + (n · 1))—is a
whole number. I’ll call it M. Now the product looks like this:
2 • M + 1, or one bigger than an even number .
Looking at a specific example often helps make sense of the generalities. Let’s look at
7 · 9.
7 is 2 · 3 + 1, while 9 is 2 · 4 + 1. As an area model, that looks like the left-hand side of
Figure 2.28.
FIGURE 2.28
Area models for 7 • 9
54
Rewriting in the style of the earlier argument, we get:
(2 • 3 • 2 • 4) + (2 • 4) + (2 • 3) + (1 • 1)
This is pictured in the right-hand side of Figure 2.28:
2 • ((3 • 2 • 4) + (4) + (3)) + 1
which is 2 · (31) + 1, and that is 63, which is both odd and the correct product.
That turns out to be an extremely complicated way to multiply any two particular
odd numbers. There are much more efficient ways to calculate 7 · 9. The power
instead is in the argument about all products of two odd numbers, which the algebraic
representation captures.
Algebra lets us use the properties of numbers and operations to make and check
claims about all numbers. Algebra moves us from “7 · 9 is odd” to “any two odd
numbers have an odd product.”
Transitioning from arithmetic (these odd numbers) to algebra (all odd numbers)
requires an understanding of structures, not just a familiarity with certain facts.
How Did You Count? is a book about structures. You can count everything in
the book one-by-one. But you can also count by twos or fives, or by pairs, rows,
columns, triangles, or squares. The fun is less in knowing how many there are, and
much more in making and sharing new ways to know how many there are. How
Did You Count? supports a virtuous cycle where the more ways you know how
to count, the more new ways you can think of. All of this is in service of a rich
understanding of number and operation relationships in arithmetic, which is not
only a worthy goal on its own, but it also builds intuitions that support later math
learning beyond arithmetic.
In the next chapter, I’ll share some fun ways to read this book at home, at the library,
at school, or anywhere else. But first, one last set of structures—a connection between
geometry and arithmetic.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURATE NUMBERS
Odd numbers as “even numbers, plus one” is an example of a number structure, and
algebra captures that by writing 2n + 1. Geometry provides another source of number
structure. How Did You Count? uses several number structures related to geometry.
We have already seen rectangular arrays; now let’s consider squares, triangles, and
pyramids.
The blue and red plastic balls on the back cover of the book are arranged in a square
(Figure 2.29). Six rows of six plastic balls, so this is a special case of a rectangular array.
Because the number of rows and the number of columns is the same, you can write 6 · 6
or 62. The expression 62 is “six to the second power” or “six squared." This connection to
geometric squares is the reason mathematicians read an exponent of 2 as “squared."
But there is more structure here. In the upper-right corner, there is one blue plastic
ball. Three red plastic balls surround it, then five blue plastic balls surround those, and
so on. The 36 plastic balls are
in groups, represented in this
expression: 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 + 11.
Thirty-six is the sum of the first
six odd numbers! Is thirty-six a
special square number in this
way? (I invite you to consider
that question for a moment
before continuing.)
In order to make the next
square number (72 or 49), you
could add six balls in a new
column on the left-hand side
of the existing square, and six
more balls along the bottom,
FIGURE 2.29
Thirty-six is six squared.
56
plus one more in the corner. In this way, you can build any (whole) square number
from the previous one. A square with side length n has n2 objects in the array. Add a
new column of n on the left, a new row of n on the bottom, and one more in the corner.
Geometric squares can convince us that:
(n + 1)2 = n2 + 2n + 1
The bowling pins in the student book are arranged in a triangle, as are the pudding
cups, and each of two groups of eggs in the egg photograph (Figure 2.30). These
triangles are special in that each row is greater than the previous by one, so triangular
numbers are sums of consecutive numbers: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 bowling pins. Sometimes—
like the bowling pins—triangular
numbers are arranged as an
equilateral triangle. Sometimes—
like the eggs—triangular
numbers are arranged as a
right triangle. Either way, the
numbers 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, etc. are
all triangular numbers.
The thirty-six plastic balls on
the front and back covers of
How Did You Count? also make
a triangle (as seen on the inside
back cover of the student book,
and in Figure 2.31). Indeed, this
is the reason I chose thirty-six
for the number of plastic balls in
these images. Thirty-six is both
FIGURE 2.30
Two triangular numbers of eggs
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.31
A triangle of spheres
a square number and a triangular number. This is a property that is uncommon, but not
unique to thirty-six. The next number that is both square and triangular is 1,225, which is
352, and also the forty-ninth triangular number.
Triangular numbers appear several times in the book in order to give children a
chance to see connections, and to feel the excitement of noticing that something they’ve
done before is useful in a new challenge. For example, you can save yourself some work
counting the pudding cups in Figure 2.32 if you know that the first four rows total ten
because they’re just like the bowling pins. Now 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 becomes 10 + 5 + 6
directly—only three things to add instead of six.
58
FIGURE 2.32
A triangle of pudding cups
The first dice picture is a sneaky version of triangular numbers, and offers an
opportunity for abstraction. There are lots of ways to count the dots on the dice in
Figure 2.33, but one of those ways is adding 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5, which is five more dots
than there were bowling pins, and also is the same as the number of eggs in the
right-hand, upside-down triangle in Figure 2.30.
The algebra of triangular numbers is just a bit more complicated than the algebra of
square numbers. Imagine two of the same triangular number, each arranged in a right
triangle—oriented in opposite directions, as in Figure 2.34.
You can push them together to make a rectangle, and that rectangle’s dimensions are
different by 1. The fourth triangular number yields a 4 by 5 rectangle; the nth triangular
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.33
A triangular number in the abstract
number yields an n by (n + 1)
rectangle. Each of the original
triangles is half of that, so the
nth triangular number is:
(n + 1)
n•
2
Square and triangular

numbers are examples of
figurate numbers, where the
figure part of figurate derives
from the geometric figures we
use to illustrate them. Hexagonal
numbers are another example
of two-dimensional figurate
FIGURE 2.34
Two triangular numbers make a rectangle.
60
FIGURE 2.35
A hexagon of tangerines
numbers. Figure 2.35 shows the

third hexagonal number.
A final example is the
tetrahedral numbers. To build
a tetrahedral number, you
layer consecutive triangular
numbers on top of each other
to make a triangular pyramid, or
tetrahedron. In Figure 2.36, the
bottom layer is a triangle with
base of four basketballs, the
second layer is a triangle with
base of three, then a smaller
triangle with base of two on top
of that, and finally one basketball
on top. Altogether, there are 10 +
6 + 3 + 1 = 20 basketballs.
Working out a way to get the total of any tetrahedral number without successive
adding, as we did for triangular, square, and hexagonal numbers, is much more
complicated. Algebra can capture this number structure, but I will not do that for
tetrahedral numbers. Instead, I’ll tell you that the nth tetrahedral number is:
(n + 2)
n • ( n + 1) •
6
This correctly counts the basketballs, as 4 • 5 • 66 = 120

6 = 20 , and you can check other
cases to see that it works. But the proof is left for you (and possibly your favorite search
engine) to discover.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.36
Tetrahedron of basketballs
Figurate numbers are lovely

ways to make home-school
connections. There are many
opportunities outside of school
for arranging objects into
shapes. A few examples include
putting mini donuts on a plate,
party favors on a table, and
dots in sidewalk chalk drawings.
Also we can look for things that
are already arranged in various
shapes. Produce sections of
grocery stores tend to be
especially rich with figurate
numbers—arrays of apples and
pyramids of pears!
The tetrahedron of basketballs brings us to an important feature of number
structures: not only do they save you time (as when using what you know about
bowling pins to count eggs), they allow you to count things that you know must exist,
but which you cannot see.
COUNTING WHAT YOU CANNOT SEE

Math teacher Steve Wyborney has a terrific website for a routine he calls Splat!
(https://stevewyborney.com/2017/02/splat/) in which a big blob has gone splat onto
some mathematical image. The student’s job is to figure what’s under the blob (see
Figure 2.37). Hiding some of the objects encourages students to conjecture about and
use structure in the image.
62
FIGURE 2.37
There are ten dots altogether. How
many are under the splat?
There are lots of opportunities

for improvising at-home
versions of Splat! Starting with
a full egg carton and using two
eggs in a muffin recipe, we can
ask how many eggs remain in
the carton. Or tell your child you
have ten pennies—three in your
open hand; how many are in
your closed fist? Reverse it and
have your child hide the coins
and quiz you. Once your child
has gained some experience, be sure to include zero in your closed or open hand. Then
do an impossible one—say you have five coins total, but show six in the open hand.
Bags, cabinets, shoeboxes—these all make excellent containers for unseen objects in
home-based games of Splat!
Back in the classroom, you could certainly use technology or sticky notes to cover
up parts of images in How Did You Count? in order to move your students forward in
using number structures. One image, though, was designed with this principle in mind—
the basketballs (Figure 2.36). In a few days spent visiting a dozen or so third- through
fifth-grade classrooms with an earlier version of the basketball image, students wildly
disagreed about how many there were. Even following lengthy discussion, I didn’t leave
any of these classrooms having come to consensus, but all students were trying to
imagine—and making claims about—the hidden objects in the pyramid.
A lovely follow-up lesson would allow children to build triangular pyramids of various
sizes in order to investigate this example, as well as larger and smaller examples. Lauren
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 2.38
Stacking spheres in frames
Siegel of MathHappens has

developed materials for this sort
of exploration (Figure 2.38).
A set of inexpensive plastic
spheres and some strategically
cut cardboard can likewise
support this same inquiry.
People sometimes
characterize mathematics as a
ladder of abstractions, where
each rung takes us further
from the physical objects of
our experience. We can help
students to climb an important
section of that ladder by asking
them to consider and count
objects that they cannot yet see
or touch, but for which they can deduce both their existence and their structure.
CONNECTING IMAGES
Students often experience math as a series of disconnected facts. Textbooks are
common culprits in fostering this experience, with skills instead of ideas, and these
skills broken down into large numbers of tiny, precise steps. Some textbooks even have
warnings to tell students not to commit particular errors at particular moments, a sort of
discouragement from connecting ideas together.
To many students, math ends up feeling like a long list of rules. Things need not be
this way, and there are many projects aimed at supporting students in understanding
math as connected and deep instead of arbitrary and shallow.
64
In that spirit, I designed the images in How Did You Count? with connections in
mind. Triangles appear in a number of images, for example. Connecting the triangle of
pudding cups to the triangle of bowling pins saves you work counting the pudding cups.
Connections can save us time.
But not all triangular arrangements are built the same. As an exercise before reading
on, consider Figure 2.39. Do you see triangles in this image? If so, how are they like or
unlike the triangles in Figures 2.30, 2.31, and 2.32?
The paint pots in Figure 2.39 have triangles using only odd numbers in the rows: 1 +
3, and 1 + 3 + 5. Noticing that both the paint pots and the bowling pins have triangular
arrangements opens space for new questions (e.g. Are there different kinds of triangular
numbers?). Context provides connections as well. Is it really the same number of
blue and red plastic balls on
the covers and endpapers of
the book? In what ways is a
tetrahedron like a triangle?
Encouraging the search for
connections supports richer
math learning. Pudding cups,
after all, aren’t really about
pudding cups—they are about
triangular numbers, addition,
and algebra. But only if you’re
looking for connections.
Many mathematicians
conceive of “counting” broadly.
Counting incorporates one-to-
one correspondence between
FIGURE 2.39
Pots of purple paint make a new
sort of triangle
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
spoken number words and physical objects (or objects in pictures), as well as multiplying
to determine the number of ways something could happen, even if none of those ways
ever does happen. Part of learning mathematics is learning new ways to count, and new
ways to represent that counting.
How Did You Count? offers lots of opportunities for each of these. This chapter has
focused on various number structures, which in turn lead to new ways of counting. The
next chapter offers ideas and resources for using How Did You Count? in classrooms
and beyond.
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CHAPTER 3
Using How Did You Count?
WHAT TRADITIONS DOES HOW DID YOU COUNT? STAND IN?

I think of How Did You Count? as “Number Talks meets How Many?” In case you’re
unfamiliar, Number Talks are opportunities for a classroom to consider multiple
perspectives on a visual arrangement of dots, or an abstract number or expression.
Several lovely guides to Number Talks have been written; my favorite is Making Number
Talks Matter by Cathy Humphreys and Ruth Parker (2015). Number Talks appear in
several published elementary curricula, and they are common instructional routines,
often making up a five- to fifteen-minute starter activity for math lessons across a wide
range of grade levels.
How Many?—an earlier book of mine—uses photographs to inspire conversations
about units and counting. In a similar vein, Pierre Tranchemontagne has a terrific
website, Number Talk Images (https://ntimages.weebly.com/), that houses a large
collection of photos to support Number Talks. Berkeley Everett has built a set of
Google Slides (https://berkeleyeverett.com/images/custom-number-talk-images/)
that allows teachers to create their own arrangements of photorealistic objects.
Graham Fletcher and Tracy Zager have published Building Fact Fluency (2020),
which includes carefully structured photos that support addition and multiplication
strategies such as counting on and doubling. These are all great resources, and my
own ideas for How Did You Count? are richer for this community’s work. How Did
You Count? builds on these traditions, and keeps an eye on developing particular
mathematical themes, such as triangular numbers and the properties of operations, as
described in Chapter 2.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Many of the teaching strategies developed or discussed by these other creators are
appropriate for using with How Did You Count? And also, How Did You Count? is written
first as a book that a child can read and enjoy on their own, or with a caregiver, sibling,
or friend.
WHAT IS A HOW DID YOU COUNT? CONVERSATION?

How Did You Count? is a physical (or digital) object—a book. But the book on its own
isn’t the thing I imagined in writing it. Instead, I was imagining conversations in which
people of many ages and levels of expertise could participate and learn together—the
interaction between perspectives expanding everyone’s understanding. In this section,
I’ll describe characteristics of these conversations in order to support you in imagining
and bringing them to life yourself.
Eliciting Student Thinking

“How did you count?” is a question that elicits student thinking. I once heard
somebody summarize a difference between teachers and lawyers this way: A lawyer
asks a question of a witness in court knowing full well what the answer is. “Where
were you on the morning of August 7th?” is not meant to draw out information
that is new to the person asking it. Instead, the lawyer asks this question knowing
what the answer is beforehand. To be sure, a certain number of such questions
are necessary in classrooms as teachers seek to support student recall. “When do
you need to return your permission slip?” and “What is our working definition of
polygon?” for example. But teachers also seek to understand and to develop student
thinking. That work requires questions whose answers the teacher does not already
know.
“How many tangerines are there?” The answer to this question, when asked about
the image in Figure 3.1, is known to the teacher: twelve. The task is simple enough
that mistakes are likely to be few in most elementary classrooms. The teacher not
only knows the correct answer, they also know that most students will know it. (This
is not true of the basketball tetrahedron in Figure 3.4, by the way, whose answers are
guaranteed to vary widely in elementary classrooms.)
68
USING HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.1
How many tangerines? How did you
count them?
Instead, the question that

elicits thinking is “How did you
count?” and the teacher usually
does not know the answer when
they ask it. There are several
very common answers, but
which student will have which
answer in mind isn’t knowable in
advance. Furthermore, in a large
enough group, there will likely
be somebody who counts in a
new or unfamiliar way. While a
teacher will have ideas about
which answers are likely, they
genuinely cannot know what a
student will say in response to
“How did you count?”
Often, a teacher will want a student to repeat an answer to a question—perhaps
something the teacher overheard while students were working in groups. In such a case,
teachers usually make it known that they already know the student’s answer to the
original question by saying something like “Kassia, please tell the class how you counted
the tangerines.” Subtle re-phrasings such as this can help to build trust that teachers are
inquiring honestly when they ask, “How did you count?”
Equal Footing
In a How Did You Count? conversation, all participants have equal access to the
mathematics. It is not a quiz where the answers are predetermined and held secret
by the teacher. It is not a game of I Spy in which a particular response is the target,
69
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
and—once uttered—ends the game. In a genuine How Did You Count? conversation,
the mathematics exists in the interactions among the participants, provoked by the
image. As a teacher (and as a reader of this book!) you have expertise that informs
your judgment about what mathematics your students are likely to see. You should use
that expertise to make sure important mathematics happens in the group. At the same
time, you need to make sure that everyone understands that the math comes from the
participants, not from an answer key, a standards document, or some other place of
authority.
Looking for Structure

The participants in a How Did You Count? conversation look for and discuss
relationships, commonalities, and differences in each image and across images. In
short, they are looking for structure. “Structure” is hard to define, but it points to the
difference between a pile of Lego and the house a child might build with the pieces. In a
sense, that house exists in the pile in that all the pieces are there. But those pieces don’t
yet have a structure. Similarly, there are twelve tangerines in Figure 3.1, but the columns,
or zig-zags, or triangles within the arrangement are forms of structure that we have to
bring to life in our minds before they really exist. Those structures are what we’ll use to
count, and to communicate our counting techniques.
Indeed, part of what students learn from How Did You Count? conversations is
what it means to say how you counted. Like dot-image Number Talks (for example in
Humphreys and Parker 2015), How Did You Count? conversations are about learning to
see and express structure. The abstract dots of a Number Talk focus students’ attention
on multiple structures for the same count. The image at the focus of a How Did You
Count? conversation is similarly rich in structure, but—unlike dots—also rich in context.
Students have expectations and assumptions that follow from these contexts (e.g. that
eggs come in dozens, or that a lid smeared with blue pudding implies a missing cup of
blue pudding somewhere).
Patterns, geometric shapes, groupings, relationships between images—each of
these is a structure. Students get better at looking for structure by practicing, and by
expanding their repertoire of ideas about what’s useful.
70
Focus on Relationships
In the spirit of asking questions whose answers we do not know, a How Did You Count?
conversation is less focused on a particular number, and more focused on relationships
among numbers. Focusing on relationships might include noticing that several counting
strategies involve groups. While the number and size of the groups may be different,
the basic strategy is the same, and that strategy is fundamentally different from
counting one-by-one. Focusing on relationships might mean inviting students to say
whether a counting-by-twos strategy feels to them more like counting one-by-one, or
more like noticing three groups of four.
Follow-up questions and tasks help focus on relationships. In the next section, I’ll
describe how intentional use of classroom media such as whiteboards and computer
projectors can also serve this purpose, and I’ll also address other pedagogical questions
related to this routine.
THE PEDAGOGY OF HOW DID YOU COUNT?

Let’s say you have a rich image of the thinking and conversation you want to make
happen in your classroom. This next section discusses some important tools and
techniques for bringing that conversation to life.
Recording
Annotation can go a long way in focusing students’ thinking on relationships. Writing
both “3 groups of 4” and “3 × 4” highlights the relationship between the operation and
its meaning. Writing both 3 × 4 and 4 × 3 emphasizes how these two expressions have
the same result—the commutative property of multiplication. Writing “4 groups of 3”
and “4 × 3” together with a diagram such as Figure 3.2 builds a bridge of relationships
from concrete to abstract.
A fascinating result of the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study) video study, summarized in The Teaching Gap (Stigler and Hiebert 2009), is that
American math teachers use instructional media such as whiteboards and projectors
differently from how Japanese math teachers use them. American math teachers tend
to use media to focus student attention on one thing at a time, and consequently new
71
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.2
Annotated tangerines
media are designed with this

use top of mind. Think about a
Kahoot! quiz, where everybody
answers the same question at
once, or the teacher dashboard
tools in Desmos Classroom,
which allows the teacher to both
control the content on each
student device’s screen, and
whether they can interact with that content. Or even think of the chalkboard we wipe
clean for each new problem.
Japanese math teachers, by contrast, tend to use instructional media more like
a mural or a scroll—information-rich, connected, and on display for a longer period
of time. The assumption is that student attention will wander. When that attention
returns to the media, the necessary information for understanding the current state
of the lesson remains available. A contrasting assumption underlying our American
teaching habits is that the teacher’s job is to not let student attention wander.
Whatever you think the role of teachers and media use should be in classrooms,
noticing and questioning these assumptions are useful steps in improving our
practice.
We can learn small things and make small adjustments to support students in
attending to relationships within and between tasks. One such thing we can learn is
skill in annotating several ideas on one image. Early elementary teacher Simon Gregg
is masterful at annotations. Figure 3.3 shows his annotations of the ideas his young
students shared while looking at an image from the book How Many? Gregg has
captured disagreements and developments, using children’s initials to indicate who
contributed which ideas.
72
FIGURE 3.3
Simon Gregg’s annotated avocados
In the upper left, we see that student E says there is 1 stone (or pit) in the image.
Student Al disagrees, pointing out that the uncut avocado must also have a pit. The
annotations capture a similar debate in the purple and red ideas near the bottom of the
image. Are there three dots on the knife handle (that we can see) or six dots (including
three we cannot see, but that must exist)? Capturing both of these exchanges allows
a teacher to point out the commonality between them; without the annotations, these
two discussions are more likely to happen independently and without connection. This
question of “should we count things that are not in the image?” is embedded much
more explicitly in the basketball image (Figure 3.4) from How Did You Count? “How
many basketballs must there be?” is a different question—with a different answer—from
“How many basketballs do you see?”
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.4
“How many basketballs can
you see?” versus “How many
basketballs must there be?”
My first year of classroom

teaching was 1994. I had
an overhead transparency
projector in my classroom.
When my seventh graders
and I talked through solutions
to problems, I would have a
prompt on one transparency,
and annotate student thinking
on a second one on top of that.
When it came time to consider
a second solution, I would often
remove the transparency I
had written on and start fresh
with a new one. That meant I
was relying on students’ memory (or my own prompting) for recall and relationship
building. Of course it’s difficult to connect two strategies to each other if you can
only ever see one of them at a time. Furthermore, I was in control. If a student wanted
to look back at the previous transparency, they had to ask me to put it back on the
projector.
All of this is to say that many of us as American math teachers have had to work hard
to learn to use classroom media to support students in making connections.
Here are some ways to use media to build connections.
Show two or more strategies at once, as in Figure 3.5. Ask questions that connect
the two strategies, such as these: What do these have in common? How are
they different? Which strategy would you use if there were many more objects,
and why?
74
FIGURE 3.5
Two strategies for the same image
Show two or more representations of the same strategy, as in Figure 3.6. Ask
questions that move between the representations, such as these: Can you find each
number (3, 8, and 12) in the
picture? I see two bunches of
red grapes and two bunches of
green grapes in each group; do
those bunches show up in the
numbers? How?
Put two related tasks side-
by-side, as in Figure 3.7. Ask
questions about relationships
FIGURE 3.6
One strategy; two representations.
Diagram (left) and symbols (right).
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.7
Juxtaposing two related tasks.
between the two tasks, such as these: What do these two pictures have in common? How
are they different from each other? How could you use your thinking or total from one of
these to help count the other one?
Tell Stories
When my children were very young, we read picture books with rich and interesting
characters taking on complicated and challenging situations. We were especially fond
of Russell Hoban’s classic Bread and Jam for Frances, in which Frances—an early-
elementary-aged anthropomorphic badger—declares that the only food she likes is bread
with jam. Her exasperated family indulges this demand, and (spoiler alert!) over the
course of several days, Frances tires of the monotony, relents, and begins to delight in a
richly varied diet. My children and I could relate to Frances and her disgust with a jiggly
soft-boiled egg at the book’s outset. Indeed, I can vividly recall a time when one of my
own children declared an entire slice of watermelon inedible because of a supposedly
76
mushy bit where a seed had been. (For the record, there was no mushy bit; there could
have been no mushy bit because there is no watermelon in an empty space! But I digress.)
The point is that we understood our lives a bit differently through this book, and we
understood the book a bit differently for having lived our lives together. After reading a
favorite story book, we would pick up a shapes book or a numbers book and have a much
less engrossing experience. Triangles, then squares, then rectangles on the next page
(but never a square on the rectangle page!). One of this, two of that, three of another.
These math-focused books were much less likely to resonate with us after the book was
finished, and offered many fewer opportunities for us to bring our experience to bear on
the books’ content.
How Did You Count? (like its sibling books, Which One Doesn’t Belong? and How
Many?) aims to break this cycle, for math has stories too. I hope that you and your
students will recognize their life experiences here, and recognize the ideas of the book
in their lives. I hope that some students will recognize the city recreation center where
we shot these photographs. I hope that some students will have stories about being the
one responsible for collecting all the soccer balls or basketballs after practice. I hope
they’ll know and share with others how difficult is to stack or organize these in any way.
I hope the pink pudding cups will produce a reaction of delight in some and disgust in
others.
In the classroom, these hopes mean leaving a bit of space for storytelling. Tell your
own stories, invite the children in your classroom to share their experiences with
bowling pins or eggs in bulk. Let your students be the experts for a while, and share
your expertise as well. Laugh together. Empathize. Here is how this sometimes sounds
when I visit classrooms.
“In a moment, we’re going to look at a picture together. I’ll ask you to count the
things in the picture, and we’ll talk about how many there are. More importantly, we’ll
talk about how you counted them. But before I show you the picture, I’ll tell you that it
is a picture of a kind of fruit. Do you have a favorite kind of fruit?”
Children will share their love of apples, or watermelon, or grapes. Some might express
their dislike of bananas or pineapple. Children might mention fruits unfamiliar to their
classmates, and we’ll celebrate this learning opportunity. Somebody might start an
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
argument about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. (If we define a fruit as the
ripened ovary of a flowering plant, then a tomato is definitely a fruit. If we define a fruit
as something sweet I would enjoy on a bowl of ice cream or baked into a pie, then we’ll
likely come to a different conclusion.) We’ll spend maybe ninety seconds on this before
I develop the mathematics of the conversation a little bit.
“Are there any of these fruits we have just discussed that you could eat more than
one of at a time?”
We’ll agree on grapes (yes!) and watermelons (no!). We might disagree on apples or
bananas. Now we’re ready to count tangerines together.
Seek to Understand and to Be Understood

A long-time local radio personality was hosting an outdoor music event one summer
evening when my daughter Tabitha was sixteen. The featured musician was one she
liked, so she wanted to go. Also she was curious to see in the flesh the person whose
voice she had heard on the radio for many years.
We arrived about fifteen minutes early, and wound our way through the small
crowd to get inside to order beverages. As we waited in a short line, standing in
the doorway leading from the restaurant’s deck, a man with a beard and a tropical-
themed shirt scooted past us from the inside heading out with a drink in each hand.
A moment or two later, I asked Tabitha if she had gotten a good look at the man who
had just exited. She had not. “There’s about a 95 percent chance that was our local
radio personality,” I said.
“You mean you’re 95 percent sure it was him,” she replied.
“Huh?” I grunted quizzically.
“It either was or it wasn’t. So it’s either a 100 percent or a 0 percent chance that it
was him. We just don’t know which one,” she explained.
“Oh. Interesting. I haven’t thought about it like that,” I said, and then proceeded to
think about it for a silent minute or two.
After a time, I raised the subject again. “So if I’m rolling a normal six-sided die, there’s
a one-in-six chance that I’ll roll a five. Is that right?” I asked her as we slowly inched
forward to the bar to order our beverages.
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She agreed, so I continued. “But then once I roll it—even if I don’t look at it, and it’s
hidden from my view—there’s no longer a one-in-six chance that it’s a five because now
it either is or it isn’t.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But you can be 61 sure that it’s a five.”
When students study probability, this relationship between how sure I am that
something is the way it is, and the probability that it is that way is a big thing to learn.
Yet, statisticians swap those two things back and forth for each other all the time—
usually without even noticing it because the relationship between the two is so familiar
to people who work with these ideas every day.
As with many topics though, it does no service to learners to dismiss a novice
perspective with the expectation that they’ll adopt the expert one. A square and a
diamond might be congruent to each other, but ignoring that the child cares about
orientation means we might never actually talk about the thing that matters to the child.
I know that two rows of three is the same as three columns of two, but pretending they
are obviously the same means children have less opportunity to wrestle with whether
they are always the same, or in what circumstances they might be different. In each of
these cases, we can invite more learners into mathematics by seeking to understand
their ideas, rather than ignoring distinctions they may see as important. Let’s seek to
understand.
In practice this means listening carefully, asking follow-up questions, inviting students
to the board to point or annotate, and encouraging conversation about the ideas our
students express.
Insist Only on Necessary Precision

Not all precision is necessary. Outside of mathematics, most of us understand this
intuitively. When explaining the meaning of a word to a young child, we naturally
simplify things and leave out details and unfamiliar special cases. “What does vehicle
mean? Well, it’s like a car or a truck; something that takes you from one place to
another,” is a natural way to answer a three-year-old’s question. “A vehicle is a thing
that usually has wheels and a motor, and is definitely not living or broken down, and
that can take people or things from one place to another, but which might only go
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
around in a circle,” is too much detail and nuance for a child’s first encounter with the
word vehicle. (For detailed discussion of definitions of vehicles, what that has to do with
math, and related resources, visit https://bit.ly/vehicle-definition.)
Mathematics is a field that thrives on precision. Even so, the needed level of
precision is contextual. There are countless stories of ideas that mathematicians
thought were precise until a strange example came along that didn’t seem to fit.
Imre Lakatos documented the evolving definition of polyhedron among eighteenth-
century mathematicians in his book, Proofs and Refutations. Bertrand Russell’s
Principia Mathematica used a great deal of space to prove that 1 + 1 = 2 because a
special project required a high level of precision.
In a How Did You Count? conversation, the context for precision is usually
communicating with each other. If a student says about the basketball tetrahedron,
“Well, the bottom layer is ten,” the rest of the class probably understands that the unit
is basketballs. In that case, insisting on stating units is not justified by a call for precision.
(There may be other valid reasons though, such as setting a habit in a classroom where
students often omit—and lose track of—the units they are working with.)
By contrast, when a student tells us how they counted those same basketballs
by saying, “Well, there’s four, four, four, and four, and then one in the middle,” we
genuinely do not know what those “fours” refer to. More precision is necessary. Such a
child might use language, gesture, annotation, or a combination of these to make their
communication more precise.
Develop Expertise
When children first play with tiling turtles at Math On-A-Stick (a large-scale playful,
creative math event that takes place annually at the Minnesota State Fair), they spend
a lot of time spinning each turtle around in order to figure out how to fit it into place.
The initial search for patterns and the attention required to visualize the tiling mean that
a design such as the one on the left in Figure 3.8 is what children usually make in their
first few minutes. As they develop expertise with their turtles, they’ll often start using
the colors of the turtles to make interesting patterns and designs.
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FIGURE 3.8
Introductory turtle play (left), and play by a child with more expertise (right).
One way to characterize learning is as developing expertise, so a child who produces

a design such as the one on the right in Figure 3.8 has learned something about the
turtles through their play.
This way of viewing learning helps me to see learners positively, and it is helpful
beyond the play setting of Math On-A-Stick. This distinction between novices and
experts can help teachers think about goals for learners, and can inform the ways we
work with How Did You Count? We want our learners to develop into experts, and
this means giving them time to explore and to experiment. It also means that we don’t
expect expertise at the outset. You can expect that it will take time for your students to
notice the mathematics of units, unit relationships, and number structures in their own
lives, to get really good at carefully explaining their ideas in order to be understood, and
to use precise language without prompting. Keep the end goal in mind. Be patient and
persistent.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.9
A large triangle of pudding cups (left). Two smaller triangles of 10 pink pudding cups, and one left
over (right).
I sometimes test and develop my own expertise with the ideas of How Did You
Count? by looking for new ways of counting familiar arrangements. I know there are
twenty-one pudding cups, because I see rows of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. But how else could
someone see twenty-one in that triangle? I know from the bowling pins that ten is a
triangle with longest row of four. Can I find two of those triangles, with one left over? By
rearranging them a little bit I can, and my way of seeing it is in Figure 3.9.
Most of my expertise, though, comes from talking math with children. From them,
I have learned that you can always count a triangular number by spiraling in from the
longest row (Figure 3.10; I’ll describe the moment I learned this in Chapter 4).
In contrast to popular notions of school mathematics there is richness here, and there
are subtleties to explore. If we understand learning as developing expertise, then How
Did You Count? tasks—as well as other well-designed counting contexts—give us and
our students plenty of opportunity to be always learning.
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FIGURE 3.10
A triangular number counted as a spiral, from the outside in.
WHAT MATH IS IN A HOW DID YOU COUNT?

CONVERSATION?
Sure, there are lots of ways to count twelve tangerines (Figure 3.1) or twenty-one
pudding cups (Figure 3.9), but why does it matter? Indeed, if the objective is knowing
how many pudding cups there are, it doesn’t matter how you count them. The goal
of a How Did You Count? conversation really isn’t to agree on how many pudding
cups there are. The goal is to learn some mathematics. This next section makes clear
some of the mathematics students learn as they discuss their counting strategies and
develop new ones.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Noticing Structure
One of the most productive mathematics questions is “How do you know?” Asking
“How do you know?” is different from asking “Why?” because “How do you know?” is
personal and the teacher cannot know its answer in advance. “Why?” is also a great
question, but is more likely to be tied to a predetermined explanation.
“Why?” sometimes even requires explaining a phenomenon unknowable to the child.
Why is 20 two tens? It just is! Compare that to “How do you know 20 is two tens?” The
possibilities expand here. Sure, you can say that you just know, but also “There is a 2 in
the tens place” or “Nineteen is ten plus nine, and twenty is one more than that, so now
you have a second ten.”
In the book How Many?, the question in the title sometimes requires the follow-up
question “How do you know?” To that question, children often reply, “I counted!” How
Did You Count? goes straight for justification, as this is where we have things to talk
about. In How Many?, we talk a lot about relationships between different units (e.g. eggs
and dozens, avocados and half-avocados, or slices and pizzas). In How Did You Count?,
we talk about the relationships between numbers (e.g. ten as the sum of the first four
counting numbers, or twenty-one as four groups of four, and five more).
Identifying Groups
Counting groups is the basis for both place value and multiplication. How Did You Count?
is a chance to play with counting groups, and to support learning both of these topics.
For example, one way to think about twenty-one is two groups of ten, and one more.
But also the pots of purple paint (Figure 3.5) can be seen as four groups of four, and
five more, or as five groups of four and one more. Only one of these is captured directly
when we write “21,” but it is all the same set of ideas. Place value is all about groups and
leftovers.
Similarly, any time we have four groups of five, we also make five groups of four.
If you practice looking for both of these you’ll get good at it pretty quickly, although
the two may not be equally clear in many situations. In any case, as this visual practice
becomes a habit of mind, it can also support a habit to manipulate abstract numbers in
the same way.
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FIGURE 3.11
An array of avocados
Questioning Assumptions
Earlier, I wrote about the one-
to-one correspondence between
pits and avocados. It is such
a safe assumption that each
avocado has one pit that it
doesn’t seem worth questioning.
But you could. And if you do,
the direct evidence in the
avocado array (Figure 3.11) leads
you to the same conclusion—
there are still 7 21 avocados.
This can be a second role of
the question “How do you know?” To avoid annoying children with repetition, here are
some variants.
• Are you sure?
• Is that always true?
• How could we check?
• Do we know that?
• Does it have to be that way?
Every assumption can be tested by this sort of questioning. Early in the process, you
may need to ask the questions. Over time, your students will learn to do it too. The goal
is to set a habit of keeping mathematical claims close to the evidence at hand.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.12
Identical arrangements of apples and half-apples
In How Did You Count? there are lots of places where we can make assumptions, and
where it is worth questioning them. The two apples photos, for example, are staged
with the same arrangement (Figure 3.12). This is to support noticing that half of twice
something is the thing you started with: 21 • (2 • 18) = 18.
Some students may notice the overall sameness of the setups: same pans, relatively full,
same-sized apples—and conclude that the two arrangements are the same. Other students
may question that assumption, perhaps owing to a defensiveness about trick questions.
Still others may not notice the similarity, or not notice that there is an assumption to
question. All students can benefit from pausing to notice that there is an assumption we
could make, and also to discuss how we might investigate the validity of the assumption.
Digging deeper, you might have made an assumption about the half-apples. Are
they thirty-six single halves of the apples from the previous photo? Or are they paired
halves of eighteen apples? Are they even halves at all, or could they be horizontal slices,
perhaps more than two per apple?
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Did you make one of those assumptions in looking at the second photograph? Did
you assume something else? How might you investigate any of these assumptions? In
what sense does it matter what assumption you make?
As a wrapping-up note about assumptions, I’ll say that it was something of a mantra
in composing these images that if something looks true, it should be true. Those
spheres on the covers and endpapers of the book look like the same spheres in the
same numbers of the same colors because they are. The tetrahedron of basketballs
(Figure 3.4) looks like it is made entirely of basketballs that are about the same size, and
it is. There are no hidden tiny basketballs to make your count “wrong” when you assume
there are no tricks. (Although I will admit that some small cardboard rings and a tiny bit
of duct tape were necessary to hold the whole thing together, and you might be able to
spot the cardboard rings on the gym floor if you look very closely.)
Making and Using Abstractions

A diagram is an abstraction of a more precise photograph. Part of the appeal of a
photo is its context. A diagram strips away a lot of this context—no more floorboards
beneath the colored spheres. Circles in a diagram might represent apples, which I love,
or oranges, which I dislike.
This stripping away of detail has a purpose, and it may lead to increased accuracy in
comparing quantities (Mix 2008). A recent report (Deans for Impact 2019) took this to
mean that early counting activities should begin with maximally abstract objects, such as
circular counters or Unifix cubes all of the same color, before proceeding to objects with
differing characteristics, or that come from everyday life. Such an approach disregards
the messy and interesting world that children inhabit, and it discounts children’s need to
use their world to make sense of math and math to make sense of their world.
There are many perspectives on what mathematics is, and where it comes from. Too
often, school mathematics curriculum falls back the formalist perspective, which asserts
that mathematics is a set of rules for moving symbols around. In this perspective, it is
a happy coincidence that 3 + 4 = 7 describes any real-world situations or experiences,
but this correspondence is not essential to what mathematics is, nor to where it comes
from. Math educator and researcher Rochelle Gutiérrez (2007) encourages educators
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
to support students’ development as critical and involved citizens by also building on

their knowledge of context and culture. The symbols, formalism, and abstractions of
mathematics matter for success in schools and society. Also, the practices and artifacts
of children’s everyday lives matter for their development as human beings.
Stripping away the connections to children’s lives by only counting abstract objects in
school lessons devalues the humanity that children bring to the classroom. Furthermore,
counting tasks that begin with abstraction remove an important step for students to
engage with—choosing and creating their own abstraction.
When my children were six and eight years old, we wondered whether Big Cheez-Its
were really “twice as large” as the originals, as the advertising claim on the box said.
We bought one box of each in order to snack and investigate. The six-year-old put the
small cracker on top of the big one. She proclaimed “No!” because the uncovered part
of the big Cheez-It didn’t seem to make up a whole small cracker. The eight-year-old
made an abstraction by tracing crackers on paper, then cutting the larger one apart. He
concluded that the Big Cheez-Its were almost, but not quite, twice as big (Figure 3.13).
FIGURE 3.13
Comparing Cheez-Its (left) and representations of Cheez-Its (right).
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So yes, the older child got a more accurate result by manipulating an abstraction
rather than the crackers themselves. The precise truth of the claim was not the goal of
the activity, though. The process of noticing a claim, gathering evidence, and accepting,
rejecting, or amending the claim was the goal. Far from a distracting feature, context
can be a launching point for lots of mathematical exploration.
Of course, there is also a place for activities that begin with abstractions, and in
certain circumstances, the abstractions can become their own context. Go ahead and
have those Number Talks with arrangements of dots! Study place value using Unifix
cubes! Just don’t be misled that abstract manipulatives need to precede contextual
investigations.
So if a bowlful of tangerines—ready for you to peel and eat them—is reality,
then a photograph of that bowl is an abstraction. The photo has stripped away the
reality of the smells and flavors, and you cannot eat the photograph. A diagram
is another level of abstraction; it might represent those tangerines, or it might
represent children or teddy bears or any appropriately arranged group of twelve
things.
A numeric expression is a further abstraction. The expression 4 • 3 could be four
groups of three tangerines, or the number of legs on three dogs, or the number of feet
in four yards. 4 • 3 might be an example you use to investigate a claim that the product
of an even number and an odd number is always even.
Each of these rungs on the ladder of abstraction is important for math learning.
Moving between these rungs is even more important. This is one of the goals of
annotations, such as those in Figure 3.14. That example offers the opportunity to ask
questions such as the following:
• If 3 • 6 means three groups of six, where do you see those groups?
• There are two threes in this expression. What does each represent?
• If instead of 3 • 6 + 3, someone wrote 7 • 3, what do you think the diagram would look
like?
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.14
Three groups of six, plus three more.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT HOW DID YOU COUNT?

Like the other books in this series, How Did You Count? isn’t a textbook or unit of study.
It is closer to a story book than a math text, so any of the ways that you might use a
favorite picture book can be adapted for How Did You Count?
Whole Group
A favorite mode of interaction with the picture book—and my primary way when I visit
classrooms due to limited time—is displaying images from the book using classroom
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media (an interactive whiteboard, computer projector, etc.). Before having students turn
and talk in pairs or small groups, I like to do some counting together in a large group. This
way I can model my expectations. Here are a few things I always include in my instructions:
• Wait time. Students need time to think. This means no waving hands in the air, and
no talking until a given amount of time has passed. You know your students and their
needs, but about a minute is a good amount of thinking time for getting a How Did
You Count? conversation started.
• Clear descriptions of strategies. If you counted by twos, tell us that! And also help us
to see the sets of two that you saw. This is an opportunity to practice spatial language
such as above, at the bottom, to the right, going around, etc. Gestures are important
for supporting this communication, so encourage gesturing together with language.
It is helpful to familiarize students with the routines of pausing for thought and
stating both a count and a technique. I tend to have them talk in small groups or pairs
or whatever structures the teacher already has in place for breaking conversations into
manageable-sized pieces so everyone can have a turn in a small amount of time.
Regardless of the age of participants or the sophistication of the mathematics I’m hoping
we’ll do together, I like to start with the first image in the picture book—the tangerines.
The structure of the tangerines is simple enough that everyone can be successful; yet the
arrangement has enough richness that there are several ways to count them.
To illustrate the utility of choosing a good starting place that is between simple and
rich, imagine a simple but not rich image with three tangerines. “How did you count
them?” could be rightly answered by most people by saying “I just know” because you
can subitize three tangerines. This leaves us with nothing to talk about. At the opposite
ends of these two scales, the basketball photograph is rich but not at all simple. We
need to build up to the complexity of the basketballs—often over several counting
sessions together. As a first exposure to How Did You Count?, the basketballs are
too complex. If we cannot agree how many there are, we are likely focused on that
disagreement rather than on seeing new structures.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Here are a couple of fun variations you might consider after you and your students
have a bit of experience with How Did You Count? conversations:
• Have students write the expressions for a counting strategy—perhaps their own
strategies, or maybe one that a classmate has talked about, or one you suggest.
• Have a student write an expression on the board, and ask the rest of the class to guess
how they counted.
• Tell students a total number—say 24—and have them write an expression for that
number (maybe (7 • 3) + 3). Then show them that many arranged objects. Can they
find their expression?
Small Group
You may choose to have students work through some How Did You Count? images in pairs
or small groups—especially after the routines have been established through whole-class
discussions. You could select about three prompts and have students move at their own
pace through the set. If you allow enough time for everyone to get through two of them,
you’ll likely give enough challenge to your faster-moving students while letting your slower-
moving students have enough time to engage. Remember that this isn’t about speed. Deep
thinking about a small number of prompts is preferable to rushing through a bunch of
them under time pressure. Noticing interesting details and relationships takes time.
Not everyone needs to do all of the same prompts. Depending on your classroom
environment and traditions, you may want to have students record some product of
their small-group work. They can record on paper, or mini whiteboards, or tablets quite
naturally. Typing responses on laptops or Chromebooks is likely to impede the kinds
of work students will want to do, which often includes drawing diagrams and arrows
pointing to parts of shapes.
One-on-One (or Two)

I have had a tremendous amount of fun with How Did You Count? conversations in
classrooms—anywhere from twenty third graders to a doubled-up collection of fifty fifth
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graders to more than 100 parents and children at a family math night. But my absolute
favorite context is sitting down with one reading partner, or maybe two. At home, this
is the standard; at school it’s a luxury. But if it turns out to be a luxury you can afford—
ever—do it. Perhaps you have a few moments with a student whose bus is running late,
or a couple of students who eat lunch in your classroom on a regular basis. A small
number of math minds paying close, careful attention and delighting in each other’s
ideas—this is the best. Make time for it if you can.
Classroom Library
Consider putting a couple of copies of How Did You Count? in your classroom library.
File them with the other nonfiction books and give students an opportunity to think
quietly, to look deeply, and to create their own individual counting experiences.
Bulletin Board
A How Did You Count? bulletin board might have several images and a collection of
sticky notes and pens. Students can write their expressions or draw their diagrams on
a sticky note and affix it next to the image. Over the course of several days, these can
accumulate and become deeper and more complicated.
Family Math Night

Families know how to support their children’s developing literacy from an early age.
We have a clear, actionable message around reading—read twenty minutes with your
child every day. We lack a similarly simple message in mathematics. With reading,
we know that the very act of reading together—whatever the parent and child read—
supports developing literacy. The same is true in math. If parents and children talk
about numbers, patterns, and shapes together, the children will be better prepared
for later success in mathematics. How Did You Count? conversations are a wonderful
addition to a standard parent math night or open house. You don’t need to do anything
different than you would for a classroom full of children—just model the same behaviors
and give parents and children an opportunity to play with counting ideas together.
My experience is that parents who already integrate math talk in their daily lives find
How Did You Count? delightful right away and see the potential for new conversations
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
beyond the confines of the book, and that parents who don’t already do much math
talk at home find the open nature of the prompts liberating. Once this latter group
understands that literally any way of seeing the arrangement is correct, parents and
other caregivers often describe a feeling of freedom—freedom from the answer key, and
freedom from doing it wrong.
Change the Task

It is always exciting to me to see the ways in which teachers and students adapt tasks to
fit their own purposes and learning. Due to this student and teacher creativity, I am able
to share with you that many of the images in How Did You Count? also serve very well
as How Many? tasks. In the process of writing this Teacher's Guide, I shared a couple of
tasks with teacher Simon Gregg, whom I mentioned earlier as a master of annotations.
Having had lots of practice with How Many? conversations, Gregg’s students went to
town, and he shared the resulting annotated images with me (Figures 3.15 and 3.16).
FIGURE 3.15
Many things to count in the bowling pins picture.
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FIGURE 3.16
Many things to count in the milk photograph.
In these images, Gregg used annotations to attribute ideas to students (by way of
initials such as S, M, and An), and to tell the story of the conversations.
ONE MORE TRADITION: VISUAL PATTERNS

Years ago, I encountered a Marilyn Burns activity called “Piles of Tiles," which
involves patterns made from square tiles. The task gives students the first several
instances of each pattern, and asks them to continue it. Students predict the
number of tiles in a later stage of the pattern, and then write a formula for the nth
stage. These are lovely tasks, and I used them with my middle school students, with
teachers in professional development, and with my College Algebra students in
order to focus their attention on the meaning of algebraic symbols. Fawn Nguyen
has compiled a large collection of these tasks on her website, Visual Patterns
(https://www.visualpatterns.org/).
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 3.17
A visual pattern with two, five, ten,
and seventeen tiles.
One struggle I sometimes had

with these tasks was students
who ignored the visual structure
of the pattern and went straight
to numbers. For example,
while working on the pattern
in Figure 3.17, such students would notice that between stages 1 and 2, there are three
additional tiles, and that between stages 2 and 3, there are five additional tiles. This led
to predicting seven additional tiles to get to stage 4, and a total of seventeen tiles. My
students could continue this additional tiles strategy to any number of stages, but they
lacked a way of capturing the total number of tiles directly.
I needed a tool to support these students in analyzing and using the visual structure
of the patterns. A version of How Did You Count? was my solution. Instead of showing
the first several stages, I would show only one stage—in this example, I might show
stage 3. I would ask for a count and several strategies in diagrams and symbols
(Figure 3.18).
This shift was huge for my College Algebra students—it turned their attention from
number patterns to number structure and made them attend to connections between
the visuals and the symbols.
Depending on the class’s
experience and expertise, the
next step would often be to
move to stage 4 and look for
the same structures—what is the
FIGURE 3.18
Several ways to count the tiles in
stage 3.
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FIGURE 3.19
If this is stage 4, what might stages 3 and 5 look like?
same, what changes, and can we see the same structures in this stage
that we saw in stage 3? In this case, we end up with 42 + 1, 3 * 4 + 5,
and 4 * 5 − 4. With more experience, showing stage 4 on its own was
less necessary. In either case, opening up to the first four stages and
asking students to write an expression for the nth stage was the final
step, not the starting place. Now all of my students had access to
ideas such as “It’s always a square, plus one—and the square’s side length is the same as
the stage number,” or “an n − 1 by n rectangle, and then a stack of n + 1 on the right-hand
side.” Students could then capture these ideas with expressions such as the following:
• n2 + 1
• (n – 1) • n + (n + 1)
• n • (n + 1) – (n – 1)
An additional way to mash up How Did You Count? and Visual Patterns, which I
learned from my math teaching friend and former colleague Michael Fenton, is to show
a single image to students, and ask, “If this is stage 4, what might stages 3 and 5 look
like?” (Figure 3.19).
DEVELOPING YOUR OWN

Time invested in selecting and framing images tends to pay off in the quality of
conversation learners are able to have. If a classroom full of students is so focused on
a person making a funny face in the background that no one notices the rich structures
in the foreground, or if they spend too much time trying to figure out what in the
world they’re looking at, then the ratio of quality mathematics to time spent can
decrease rapidly. Here then are a few tips for selecting and making images with a higher
likelihood of generating good How Did You Count? conversations.
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HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Look for Interesting Arrangements

Throughout the book How Did You Count?, the images have interesting arrangements
of objects. It’s not just that there are lots of things (e.g. 21 cups of pink pudding or
125 dots on top of 25 dice); it is that there are several interesting ways to count them
(e.g. in successively increasing rows, or by combining differently sized rows to make
same-sized groups).
You might keep an eye out for some of the following:
• Tidy arrangements with missing objects, such as an egg carton with three missing eggs.
• Tidy arrangements with extra objects, such as a full egg carton with another three
eggs next to it on a countertop.
• Things arranged in a way that makes a larger shape, such as a square, triangle, or
hexagon.
• Groups of groups of things.
• Some combination of these (e.g. a hexagon with spaces for two missing objects).
If you make an interesting arrangement the focal point of your image, you’ll have at
least one extra layer of mathematical depth (beyond simple counting) that will take a
moment for students to notice and to talk about. Look for examples in your life, and in
your students’ lives.
Make It Clear
It’s fun to have a variety of things to count, but having too many things distracts from
the conversation. Keep background clutter to a minimum and help students focus on a
smaller, related variety of counting targets.
Fill the Frame

When I first started capturing mathematical images for use with my students, I
wasn’t very bold. I would take a quick picture from whatever angle was convenient
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or easy—even in my own home. It’s like I thought the marshmallows would be shy
about having their photo taken, so I needed to do it quickly while they weren’t paying
attention. These images turned out not to work as well by the time I projected them
in front of a crowded classroom. Now I understand that I need to take my time, get
right up in the marshmallows’ faces (figuratively speaking, of course), and fill the frame
with the thing I want my students to see. This isn’t Where’s Waldo? where the fun is
in hunting for a small thing hidden in a sea of noise. This is about drawing learners’
attention to bold images of mathematical relationships in the world. Make it easy to see
something that might otherwise be easy to overlook.
Attend to Lighting
Shadows can be trouble, and can make it harder to distinguish the subject of your
photograph. I have a favorite spot near the large front windows of my workshop that
gets lots of natural light—especially in the afternoon, when the light is indirect through
these east-facing windows. I can be spotted from the street very carefully arranging all
sorts of odd objects.
Keep an eye out for similar spots in your own home and school—well lighted, lightly
trafficked areas where you can take a minute or two to compose your photo. Of course
there are lots of great How Did You Count? images that are at too large a scale to be
able to choose your location. Objects on the scale of trains, parking lots, buildings, large
crowds of people, and trees may provide some great conversations, but you can’t select
where to photograph them. You can usually pick the angle, though, and sometimes
even the time of day or the weather. In any case, developing a habit of considering the
options for lighting before taking a picture will—over time—increase the quality of the
math you and your students are able to discuss.
99
CHAPTER 4
Mathematical Encounters
A
n important test I apply to most of my ideas is whether they provoke
interesting thinking in people with a wide range of expertise. The pudding
cups (Figure 3.9) are arranged as a triangle. If you know about triangular
numbers, you can use that knowledge in this task. But you don’t have
to know about them to participate. Furthermore, later images will likely stretch the
boundaries of your thinking about triangular numbers—by combining two triangular
numbers or moving into the third dimension.
In that spirit, this chapter shares counting strategies shared by mathematical thinkers
of diverse ages in response to How Did You Count? images that demonstrate many
levels of mathematical sophistication. Ideally most readers will recognize their own
thinking somewhere in this chapter, and also take away something new.
ONE-BY-ONE UNTIL YOU DON’T

Gwen was a ten-year-old volunteer extraordinaire at Math On-A-Stick one recent
summer. She took her assignment to greet visitors and explain to them the Number
Game very seriously and did excellent work. (The Number Game challenges fairgoers to
find one of something, two of something else, and so on up to twenty.) Nonetheless, I
was able to squeeze in a little counting time together between visitors.
We began with tangerines, which Gwen counted one-by-one. Next she counted the
bowling pins, the pudding cups, and the eggs, one pin, cup, and egg at a time.
After counting the paint pots one-by-one, she took a look at the apples and
announced that it was time for her break. We handed her job off to another volunteer,
100
M at h e mati c a l En c o u nt e r s
and I moved on to other tasks. About fifteen minutes later, after some downtime and
cotton candy, I noticed Gwen back on the job. She flagged me down to let me know
there were thirty-six apples, which she demonstrated by counting by threes in each pan
of apples.
The grapes she counted by twelves (three groups of four green grapes makes twelve,
then another set like that for twenty-four, etc.) until she ran out of known multiples of
twelve. At that point, Gwen finished counting by ones. For the large arrangement of
dice, she announced, “This one I just have to count by fives!”
I have to admit that I was nervous through the first part of this conversation. Was
Gwen going to count everything one-by-one? Perhaps it was the bathroom break;
perhaps it was the cotton candy; perhaps she was just ready to try something new.
Whatever triggered it, I was delighted (and admittedly a bit relieved) by her new
strategies in the second half of the book.
Gwen’s counting story is an example of the power of persistence—hers and mine—for
if either of us had given up, she would never have applied more sophisticated tools to
these tasks. It is also a reminder to me about assumptions of prerequisites. If we only ever
give students simple tasks that they can complete with simple methods, they’ll never
need to develop more complicated methods. We all need tasks that make us stretch.
WHEN FORMULAS FAIL US

After my conversation with Gwen, I did the same with Asa, an advanced high school
math student and annual volunteer at Math On-A-Stick.
We started with the pudding cups, which he knew right away as twenty-one, telling
me that’s the sixth triangular number. The eggs he also swiftly counted: ten and fifteen—
two triangular numbers totaling twenty-five.
I was again feeling a little nervous. Gwen started out doing everything one-by-one;
Asa was doing everything from memory. But then we got to the basketballs.
“I don’t know these… tetrahedral numbers, I guess.”
There was a short thinking pause.
“Well, it’d be 10 + 6 + 3 + 1, so twenty,” he told me, indicating that he was adding
triangular numbers from the bottom of the stack of basketballs to the top.
101
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
One of my fears with teaching things like triangular numbers is that they’ll be seen
as the goal themselves. If I have a list of triangular numbers memorized—or square
numbers, or even a formula for either one of these—I might rely on that list so much
that I can’t work with things that aren’t on the list. I worry about training students to
associate this list of numbers with triangles rather than equipping students with tools
for analysis.
I need not have worried about that with Asa. He met something he didn’t know and
used the things he did to make sense of the new situation.
If I’m being perfectly honest, though, the part of How Did You Count? that Asa
found most compelling was a two-page spread that had been created by a missing
page in my prototype (Figure 4.1). The left-hand page read “How many soccer balls?
FIGURE 4.1
A missing page generates an unexpected answer.
102
How did you count them?” and the right-hand page had the first apple photo. Asa
delightedly pointed out to me that—strictly speaking—there were no soccer balls at all.
IT GOES BOTH WAYS

Asa knew a formula for triangular numbers. Celeste is a sixth grader with a similarly
intimate knowledge of triangular numbers. When she saw a triangular pyramid of plastic
spheres (Figure 4.2), she recognized “layers of triangular numbers” as a way to count,
and then elaborated.
“If I ever need ten of something, I just grab 1, 2, 3, 4 of them. It’s easy that way!”
As we worked our way through the beginning of the book, I learned more about
Celeste’s ideas about triangular numbers. The pudding cups were twenty-one because
“they’re in a triangle with a base of six,” for example.
“Triangular numbers are a
great way to count things, up
until about five or six. After that,
it’s too hard to tell how many
are in the base,” she informed
me.
Celeste was showing a rich
and bidirectional relationship
between quantities and number
structure here. In one direction,
she uses the structure of ten as
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 whenever she needs
to count out ten things. She
counts ten by subitizing the first
four counting numbers. In the
FIGURE 4.2
A triangular pyramid of plastic
spheres as layers of triangular
numbers.
103
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
other direction, seeing things arranged as a triangle (such as the layers of the sphere
pyramid) means they’ll be easy to count because she knows lots of triangular numbers
by heart. There are twenty-one pudding cups because the triangle has a base of six
pudding cups.
FIGURATE NUMBERS
At a surface level, neatly arranged everyday objects give us something pretty to look
at while we practice counting, and How Did You Count? certainly has an aesthetic. At
a deeper level, these images connect big mathematical ideas to our everyday lives.
Bowling pins are not just arbitrarily arranged in groups of ten; they are in triangles. Eggs
are in rectangles. You can make and see groupings and shapes with just about anything.
Beyond the four operations of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication,
and division), algebra has many geometry structures built in. A student has a much
better chance of learning to work fluently with something like x 2 + 3x + 2 if they’re not
mystified about why x2 is pronounced “x-squared.” In fact drawing x 2 as a square is a
great first step in rewriting x 2 + 3x + 2 as (x + 2) (x + 1), as in Figure 4.3.
FIGURE 4.3
Two expressions for the area of the same rectangle.
104
Numbers of things arranged to look like squares, triangles, and hexagons are not
standards in elementary school. Nevertheless, they do support grade-level learning
about patterns, structures, and number relationships, and they offer students a chance
to become familiar with these ideas so that they aren’t mysterious when meeting them
later on.
A square number is a number you get by multiplying a whole number by itself.
3 • 3 = 9, so nine is a square number. The process of multiplying a number by
itself is called squaring, and is often indicated with an exponent of 2, so we can
write 32 = 9, and read this as “three squared equals nine.” The same notation and
language go with algebraic symbols, so that x • x = x 2, and we can read x 2 as
“x-squared.”
But why “squared” for
multiplying a number by itself?
The answer is because there
is a relationship between
square numbers and squares.
In particular, a 3-inch by
3-inch square has an area of
9-square inches (Figure 4.4),
and similarly if you have nine
things, you can arrange them
in a square-ish sort of way as
three rows of three (Figure 4.5).
The same is true for any square
number of objects—you can
make an arrangement that has
the same number of rows as
columns.
FIGURE 4.4
Squaring three
105
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 4.5
A square of wooden circles
Square numbers are among

the most familiar examples
of a larger collection of
number types called figurate
numbers, named for the
geometric figures you can use
for their arrangements. High
school math often works with
triangular numbers, in which
the first row has one object, the
second has two objects, and so
on. The standard arrangement
of ten bowling pins shows
that ten is a triangular number
(Figure 4.6).
We say nine is “three-
squared” because there are
nine things in a square of three rows and three columns. For that same reason, we
could say that six is “three-triangled” or ten is “four-triangled,” but we don’t. I expect
certain classrooms would find a lot of joy in doing so, though, and I hope to visit one
someday!
Figurate numbers are aesthetically appealing because their arrangements have
orderly patterns. Also because of these orderly patterns, figurate numbers are a
common tool for middle and high school algebra work that uses variables to capture
and represent structures. Fawn Nguyen’s excellent Visual Patterns website is a terrific
resource for such tasks (https://www.visualpatterns.org/).
How Did You Count? has several examples of figurate numbers embedded, including
square and triangular numbers, but also tetrahedral numbers (Figure 4.7).
106
FIGURE 4.6
A triangle of bowling pins
THE MAGIC NUMBER

You can lay the foundation for figurate numbers even if students don’t notice the figure.
This is because the “figure” is only one aspect of the structure. Every triangular number
has smaller embedded groups, which might be little triangles, or rows, or combinations
of rows, or something else entirely. Whatever structure a child is familiar with, they’ll
likely apply to the new context of a figurate number. Ten-year-old Gwen found groups
of twelve grapes; twelve-year-old Celeste saw sets of triangular numbers in a pyramid.
In this next vignette, seven-year-old Clem brings his own structure to a hexagonal
number.
107
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 4.7
A tetrahedron (or triangular pyramid) of basketballs
The hip hop band De La Soul has a song about three being the magic number,
which is itself a reference to an old Schoolhouse Rock video dating back to my own
childhood, entitled “Three Is the Magic Number.” My friend Faith’s son Clem watched
this Schoolhouse Rock video many times one spring, and began to see the world in
terms of threes.
Faith and I were talking about an early draft of an image from How Did You Count? (at
left in Figure 4.8), and she found herself counting these oranges by threes, thinking of
the video, and she posited that Clem might also do so. She shared the image with Clem
early the next morning, and sure enough, three was the magic number for Clem as well.
Faith sent me the annotated version of Clem’s counting that is at right in Figure 4.8.
108
FIGURE 4.8
A hexagon of tangerines (left) and how Clem counted them (right).
This combination of culture—in the form of a catchy educational music video—and

structure—in the form of easy-to-find groups of three—is powerful for supporting the
growth of young mathematicians.
SIX PLUS FOUR

In a third-grade classroom, students shared several strategies for counting the grapes
(Figure 4.9). Some counted the green grapes and the red grapes separately and added
the two totals. Others counted the grapes in each column, or in each row, and added
those subtotals. Still others skip-counted or used known multiplication facts.
Then a student raised her hand and told me, “I saw four green grapes and six red
grapes.” This sounded to me a lot like the previous strategies shared by other students,
so I paused to find out what more she had to say. She seemed to be finished, so after a
few moments, I asked “Did you think about ten then?”
109
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FIGURE 4.9
Groups of grapes
“No!” she replied. But then she

tilted her head and looked at
the board quietly for a moment.
“Ohhhhhh… It IS ten! So they’re
all ten!”
It is impossible to know
exactly which ideas were novel
for her in this moment, but
possibly one of them was the
distributive property. In that
case, six fours and six sixes
would have transformed into
six tens. Perhaps it was a more
specific idea about convenient
combinations—why add 4 + 4 +
4… when you can add 4 + 6?
Maybe it was something else.
In any case, hers was the first observation in this conversation that seemed to look
purposefully at the green and red grapes in smaller combinations. A little nudge was all
she needed to make a new connection and use a new idea.
After all, ten really is a powerful idea. There are sixty grapes, and sixty is, by definition,
six tens. If you have two twelves and two eighteens, or if you have twenty-four and
thirty-six, those also total sixty, but they require further computation. Six tens just is
sixty.
CONNECTING MATH AND GYM

An early version of this book had photographs of different objects than the final version
does. In particular, I first visited classrooms with the photo in Figure 4.10.
110
FIGURE 4.10
Juice boxes, not bowling pins
As the teacher looked on, the

children and I counted the juice
boxes several ways. Finally, the
teacher raised her hand and I
called on her. “Third graders,”
she said. “These remind me of
something we’ve seen before.”
Children called out other
packaged foods and tried to recall
other square-ish things from their
recent school environment.
“I remember in gym class, you
worked with some things that
were arranged this way…”
The children thought.
“It was the unit before the last
one…”
“Bowling!” a student exclaimed. “It’s like the bowling pins!”
“Yes,” the teacher replied. “And how many were there that you were trying to knock
down?”
“Ten!” several children called out joyously and at once.
At this point, it wasn’t clear to me whether the children remembered that there had
been ten pins, or whether the sameness of the juice box and bowling pin arrangements
implied that there must have been ten pins. But the teacher, having waited for the
children to make a connection themselves, did a lovely job ensuring they would
encounter it somehow.
In honor of that classroom, the juice box picture became the bowling pin picture in
the final version of How Did You Count? “I just know it!” and “That’s how bowling pins
111
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
are” are now both reasonable answers to the question “How did you count?” Ideally, this
would set us up for opportunities to notice this arrangement embedded in later images,
such as the pudding cups, eggs, basketballs, or the first dice picture.
To do that though, we need to make the bowling pin structure familiar. “How could
we check that there are ten?” and “Tell us more about how you know these pins are
properly arranged, with no extras or missing pins” are examples of teacher moves that
elicit the 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 structure, which repeats in those other images.
SEEING THINGS SIMPLY

One of my favorite moments in math is when a learner sees simplicity in something I
thought was difficult or complex. When I first tested How Did You Count? in classrooms, I
expected the Megadice picture (Figure 4.11) to be the most difficult. I thought of this image
as five groups of five dice, each
with five dots, so 5 • 5 • 5, or 53.
In this image, I saw exponents
and fractals. Fourth graders saw
fives. Boy howdy, do nine- and
ten-year-olds know things about
fives! They made five fives for
twenty-five, then four of those
for 100 and one more twenty-
five. They took the four corners
of each set of five dice to make
twenties—five of those twenties
make 100, and then there are
five middle dice left; each with
five dots. They paired dice up
FIGURE 4.11
Megadice—how many dots on all
the dice combined?
112
FIGURE 4.12
Super-Megadice—how many dots
on the tops of all the dice?
with each other to make tens,

then counted twelve tens and
five more. In short, the biggest
number in this book turned out
to be no big deal for children to
count creatively because they
saw a simpler structure than
I did.
In response to this, I almost
regret not including the Super-
Megadice photo (Figure 4.12) in
How Did You Count? I include it
here for you and your students
to consider. How many dots in
five groups of (five groups of
(five groups of five))?
SEEING THINGS LESS SIMPLY

A mathematician friend of mine, Barry, finds joy in the relationship between the simple
and complex—whether it is seeing a simple way to solve a complex problem or a complex
view of something that seems simple on the surface. So naturally, I was relieved to have a
draft copy of How Did You Count? on hand when Barry happened by a math table I was
manning at a local arts festival. He had lots of interesting ideas about counting, but the
one that sticks with me most is his counting the dots in the Megadice photo.
“It’s one-eighth of one thousand,” he said after a couple moments of thought. I had
already told him about the elementary children’s complete mastery of counting these
dots, owing to their facility with fives.
“Huh?” I replied to Barry’s assertion about fractions of a thousand.
113
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
“Well, each five is half of a ten. So you could have ten groups of (ten groups of ten),
which would be 1,000,” he began.
Somehow the rest of his thinking was difficult to articulate, but together we worked
to make explicit that ( 21 of 10) • ( 21 of 10) • ( 21 of 10) is the same as ( 21 • 21 • 21 ) of (10 • 10 •
10), or 81 of 1,000, which agrees with the elementary children’s count of 125.
If you continue Barry’s logic, then the Super-Megadice photo (Figure 4.12) should
have 161 of 10,000 dots. Does it?
SEEING THINGS SEVERAL WAYS

The precursor to the tetrahedron of basketballs was a version—much easier to make—
rendered in tangerines (Figure 4.13). We had a great deal of fun with this image on
Twitter as I was developing and testing out early versions of How Did You Count?
My experience on Twitter (with presumably much older participants) very closely
matched my experience in
elementary school classrooms. In
both spaces, there was a lot of
disagreement about how many
tangerines make up the pyramid,
and there were many ways of
attacking the problem of counting
them.
There are three main counting
strategies that lead to a total of
twenty tangerines. The first of
these is how Asa and Celeste
counted the basketballs earlier in
this chapter—as layers of triangular
numbers (Figure 4.14, upper right).
FIGURE 4.13
Tetrahedron of tangerines
114
FIGURE 4.14
Tangerine tetrahedron, decomposed three ways.
115
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Other people dissect the larger tetrahedron into smaller ones, as in the lower left in
Figure 4.14. Doing that results in five smaller tetrahedra, each with four tangerines. This
one seems to require different visualization skills than the layers strategy. Often, people
count the four groups of four at the corners, and then imagine more tangerines in
between than there actually are, resulting in frequent counts of twenty-one.
Finally, some people slice the tetrahedron into rectangular layers, starting along one
edge, as in the lower right of Figure 4.14. That gives us four rectangles: 1 by 4, 2 by 3, 3
by 2, and 4 by 1.
NUMBERS THAT ARE BOTH SQUARE AND TRIANGULAR

Teacher and parent Nicole Medina reported on Twitter one day that her seven-year-old,
inspired by the TV show Number Blocks, had discovered that thirty-six is both a square
number and a triangular number (which is a step number in the show). The child wanted
to know whether there was a technical word for such a number.
“Nice!” I replied. “I do not know a name for this. Is the child curious whether there are
other such numbers?”
I spent some time on this problem—What numbers, if any, are both square and
triangular?—as I was working on How Did You Count? In particular, I wanted a sequence
of photos for the cover and endpapers in which the same objects were arranged in
multiple ways (Figure 4.15). Like Nicole’s seven-year-old, I found thirty-six; and like him,
I also wondered whether there were more.
It turns out that the next number that is both square and triangular is quite large. A
seven-year-old is extremely unlikely to come across the next one, in fact. And that leads
to a challenging question: How do I engage with a child who is on a quest that I know
will not be successful?
In these instances, I sometimes imagine a child headed into the backyard with a
shovel and plans to dig a hole to the other side of the planet. I know they will not
succeed in their quest. I also know that they’ll have a great time along the way. They’ll
find some worms and interesting bugs. Perhaps they’ll end up with a hole large enough
to step down into, in which case they’ll feel quite proud of themselves. Apart from
safety hazards and keeping them from wrecking my beloved vegetable garden, there is
116
FIGURE 4.15
Thirty-six is both square (left) and triangular (right).
no reason to squash this quest. I feel the same way about mathematical missions, except
that there is even less danger and the child truly cannot wreck anything.
In teaching there is an implicit social contract, and as teachers, we should be mindful
of that. Announcing “Your homework tonight is to find the next number after thirty-six
that is both square and triangular” is a violation of that contract in most classrooms.
Students have a reasonable expectation not to be required to complete a task at which
the teacher knows they will fail. At the other end of things though, telling students that
the next such number is beyond their grasp precludes the potential for some excellent
mathematical investigation.
Thirty-six is the eighth triangular number. To get the ninth one, you add nine (36 + 9 =
45). In general, if you know the nth triangular number, you add n + 1 to get the next
one. But thirty-six is the sixth square number. To get the seventh one, you add thirteen,
which is 2 • 6 + 1. In general if you know the nth square number, you add 2n + 1 to get
the next one. These are beautiful patterns, and useful for lots of mathematical work.
117
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
Each pattern relies on the simple concept of next. If encouraging a search for the next
number that is both square and triangular elicits some of these ideas, I say Let’s do it!
The dream here is a child who reports back later on, saying something like “I don’t
think there is another one—I tried the next ten square numbers and none of them was
triangular.” Such a claim on its own represents a mathematical achievement and is
worthy of celebration!
In case it comes up in your classroom, zero and one are also both square and
triangular, and the next such number after thirty-six is 1,225, which is 352, and also the
forty-ninth triangular number.
THE EFFECTS OF HOW DID YOU COUNT? IN YOUR CLASSROOM

This chapter has been about exploring number structures through counting tasks.
The images in How Did You Count? are a starting place—a set of examples for seeing
relationships between numbers,
between numbers and operations,
and among numbers, algebra, and
geometry.
After a number of How Did You
Count? conversations, you and
your students will likely begin
to see new relationships in the
world—interesting groupings
and new shapes. For example, in
the process of writing this book,
I noticed the holes in a spice
jar shaker top for the first time
(Figure 4.16).
FIGURE 4.16
Spice jar shaker top. How many holes?
How did you count them?
118
I hope that you and your students will notice number structures and geometry
everywhere. I hope that you’ll generate new answers to old textbook questions, new
ways of grouping the objects in your classroom, and perhaps new ways of grouping
yourselves! I hope you will find joy, like my mathematician friend does, in finding
simplicity (such as counting fives in the Megadice photo) in complex things, and
complexity (such as many ways to count tangerines) in simple things. And I hope that—
through that joy—you will all build new mathematical strengths that will serve you well
in your future endeavors, both inside and outside of math classrooms.
119
CHAPTER 5
Answers Key
W
hen I wrote Which One Doesn’t Belong? I was hesitant to include an
answer key. My experience has repeatedly demonstrated to me that
“the back of the book” holds too much power in the mathematical
relationship among students, teachers, and content. Additionally,
Which One Doesn’t Belong?—like How Many? and How Did You Count?—was written
deliberately to have multiple right answers, not all of which I could know in advance.
At the same time, I understood that I had something useful to share with teachers as
a consequence of talking with hundreds of learners about each of the tasks in the book.
I knew some answers that I hoped for in designing these images, but I also had learned
about answers I could not have imagined on my own. I knew a lot about how likely each
of these answers was to arise in a variety of classrooms.
I shared this dilemma with my friend and colleague Michael Fenton, who had the
brilliant idea of making it plural: “Answers Key." Where Answer Key carries some baggage
about mathematical authority, Answers Key signals a questioning of that authority.
Please consult this Answers Key in that spirit. I want to support you and your students
in noticing a wide range of possible structures. I want the Answers Key to model and
validate divergent thinking. I hope you will annotate your copy of this Answers Key so
that your own version becomes richer and more interesting than mine.
One final word of clarification about the following pages. Each image shows one
way of seeing the structure of the objects—bowling pins, basketballs, or whatever—and
at least one corresponding way of using symbols to represent that structure. These
images do not represent an ideal of what your own board should look like at any stage
of the conversation. You and your students will use colors and arrows and gestures and
language to make communication about their ideas more clear.
120
ANSWERS KEY
BOWLING PINS
121
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
PUDDING CUPS
122
ANSWERS KEY
EGGS
123
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
PAINT POTS
124
ANSWERS KEY
BASKETBALLS
The top two answers here depict ways to count all of the basketballs. The bottom one
shows a common way of counting the visible basketballs.
125
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
SOCCER BALLS
126
ANSWERS KEY
APPLES
127
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
HALF APPLES
128
ANSWERS KEY
SHOES
129
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FLOWERS
130
ANSWERS KEY
GRAPES
131
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
DICE
132
ANSWERS KEY
MEGADICE
133
HOW DID YOU COUNT?
FINALE
134
References
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Mathematics 5 (7): 400–5.
Deans for Impact. 2019. The Science of Early Learning. Austin, TX: Deans for Impact.
Dehaene, Stanislas. 2011. The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.
Revised ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Fletcher, Graham, and Tracy Johnston Zager. 2020. Building Fact Fluency. Portsmouth,
NH: Stenhouse.
Gutiérrez, Rochelle. 2007. “Context matters: Equity, success, and the future of
mathematics education.” In T. Lamberg and L.R. Wiest (Eds.), Proceedings of the
29th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for
the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Stateline (Lake Tahoe), NV: University of
Nevada, Reno.
Humphreys, Cathy, and Ruth Parker. 2015. Making Number Talks Matter: Developing
Mathematical Practices and Deepening Understanding, Grades 4–10. Portsmouth, NH:
Stenhouse.
Mix, K. S. 2008. “Children’s numerical equivalence judgments: Crossmapping effects.”

Cognitive Development 23 (1): 191–203.
Stigler, James W., and James Hiebert. 2009. The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the
World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom. New York: Free Press.

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H ow D i d Yo u C o u nt ?

How Did You

First published 2025

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2025 Christopher Danielson

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

ISBN: 9781625312938 (set)

Access the Support Material: https://www.routledge.com/9781032898377

Chapter 1: What Counts as Counting? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2: How Counting Develops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Chapter 3: Using How Did You Count? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Chapter 4: Mathematical Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

Chapter 5: Answers Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

What Counts as Counting?

Same deal if I count by twos,

Student: There are twenty of those little silver circles.

• four groups of five

• two groups of ten

This series of assignments

(A × B) × C = A × (B × C) for all possible values of A, B, and C.

(A groups of B) groups of C = A groups of (B groups of C).

(4 rows of 3) pairs of shoes = 4 rows of (3 pairs of shoes)

That’s 12 pairs, or 12 × 2 on the left, and 4 groups of 6, or 4 × 6 on the right.

multiplication (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 is 4 groups of 3, or 4 • 3). Because exponents are a

How Counting Develops

“Ten… twenty… thirty… forty… fifty… sixty… seventy… eighty… ninety…”

Here, she paused for a few

“…Tenty TEN! MOM! This thing

Learning to count involves

innate. In fact, babies as young as a few weeks

so there is substantially more

THE COUNTING SEQUENCE (A.K.A. THE NUMBER POEM)

• She counts one to twelve correctly and confidently.

• She skips some teens.

• She skips twenty.

• She doesn’t get past twenty-nine.

• Not ever pointing to one of the objects in the set.

Teacher: How many oranges are there?

• One-to-one correspondence and cardinality. If you—an adult—are learning to count

SOME NUMBERS ARE SPECIAL

Many of us have a physical

5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40…

When young children first

When a child starts making

A Word About Standard Algorithms

Addition and Multiplication

first pair of pants and the first

understanding the importance of one-to-one correspondence, and understanding

The Commutative Property

In mathematics, there is a difference between something that is sometimes true, and

Rotate that diagram 180°, and you have

For multiplication, the situation is a bit more

deeper into other aspects

The Associative Property

If you—as many children do—happen to know your doubles facts (3 + 3, 4 + 4, etc.),

25 + (10 + 5) = (25 + 10) + 5

The commutative property of addition lets us rewrite this last expression as

(30 + 40) + 12 = (30 + 40) + (10 + 2)