ABSTRACT
Young children’s experience with counting in pre-school is often limited to counting objects. Counting objects is a way of counting in which children learn to establish a one-to-one correspondence between number labels and objects. This way of counting does not teach children much about the number system. They learn little about additive composition (at best, they may learn that n + 1 equals the following number in the number system), they learn little about the existence of a base (whatever they learn comes from the generativity of number labels), and they probably learn little about decomposition and recomposition. However, children are exposed in their everyday activities to money. Counting money, unlike counting objects, may teach children basic properties of the number system, which can be well understood in this situation and, we claim, can be used in school to teach the decimal numeration system with significant gains to the semantic understanding of the numeration system and with good transfer to learning addition and subtraction.
