Dear Dr. Leo:

Writing in regards to our daughter, Claire, age 3. I've been comparing Claire's progress with the suggestions in your E-Mails. Claire first learned to "say" her numbers 1-10 then 11-20 and so on. I was happy to read about the difference with saying and counting numbers. Claire is able to count as far as she can say her numbers. Which right now is 40.  She quickly picked up the concept of counting objects in A book or items around the house or toys in the toy room. It took us a month or two to not re-count an item already assigned a number. But she did quickly pick up the understanding of cardinality.  I actually took that for granted that she wouldn't understand that the last number was the total. She's been doing these things for probably 6 months plus. I was also happy to read about your idea of teaching in quantities of 10.  Again I think it was another method I took for granted. We were teaching her numbers 10 at a time so she was learning base 10 on her own.  I came to this conclusion by listening to her count a few weeks ago. She had counted to 29 and instead of saying 30, she first said 20-10. I didn't think too much of it at the time until I got her E-mail!  We are working on learning fractions with the Duplo blocks. This is working well and she understands the whole square concept and dividing into quarters. We have yet to proceed further with this.

With our son Matthew, age 21 months we read several books on counting, practice counting to 10 with our fingers and with Duplo blocks. I'm sure he understands and will respond more when he's more verbal. He does now try to hold his fingers up while we count.    Hope this isn't too long.   Thanks Natalie

Cullen   Emily   Lindsey   Kortlyn

Leo Leonidas, MD, FAAP   Assistant Clinical Professor In Pediatrics, Tufts University, Boston; Attending Pediatrician, Eastern Maine Medical Center, Bangor

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