How Many?

How can we ask the question "How many?" in an authentic context?

There are tons of times during the day that children count how many, without the teacher needing to ask, "How many?"

One of the 'not so authentic' times I use the question is at the beginning of the day, during our whole class meeting, when the leader points to the words and we read together "Today is Monday" and then "How many...are there?"

It was gumballs (previously the chart was a gumball machine, before I went for the plain blue). I found some ducks with velcro on the back of them and it became "How many duck are there?". We say it with some rhythm which worked better when it was gumball. 

In the picture you'll see that someone has matched the yellow ducks onto the yellow gumballs. As a class, we talked about there being 5 ducks and 2 hens. There are also 3 more red gumballs. From focusing on this the children may see the different ways to make 10. Or they might see that we can match one duck to one gumball. Or they may see that 5 and 2 is 7. It's not up to me to decide that each child is ready to see, or learn. Each child will take something of their own from this experience.

I keep the number of gumballs, or other items, to less than 10. And usually I keep the same number of items for a couple of weeks so that children will begin to see that any number of items can be arranged differently.

This display is available for the children to play with during the day, rearranging the gumballs or the ducks. One popular game was to hide 1 or two of the gumball so we'd be wondering why there were 1 or 2 less gumballs than were there the previous day. 

Something so simple yet such a lot opportunities for learning.