ABSTRACT
This chapter begins a detailed examination of some of the most significant components of children’s developing knowledge about numbers. It looks at what children know and at the alternative interpretations that have been advanced to account for their development Clearly, a basic component of learning to count is learning the sequence of numbers we use in counting. Even very young children can count sets of two or three accurately, but not larger sets—a finding that led one early researcher to characterize young children’s knowledge of numbers as “un, deux, trois, beaucoups”—suggesting that the larger numbers are an undifferentiated “many” for the young child. Children typically learn to count into the teens by about 41/2 years of age. After that, their learning of the counting sequence shifts from primarily memorization to the learning of generative rules by which larger numbers are generated.
