ABSTRACT
Mentally handicapped children can often be taught how to integrate the various stages of a complex of actions, and thereby to extend and develop their conceptual understanding. The model used for teaching communication was based on the elements of a conversation: information is exchanged in an orderly manner between two or more people. Communication problems in infancy are sufficiently common to warrant a diagnostic label: the non-communicating child. The aim for the exercises was to give the children experiences of applying number work in the form of gross motor activities. A gross motor exercise which embodies the elements of question and answer ran along the following lines. In line with the notion that the relevant gross motor experience underlies the development of fine skills and later symbolization and abstraction, it was important to find out how far they could go in applying principles of numeracy to gross motor activities.
