Counting & Cardinality

The Counting & Cardinality (CC) domain in Kindergarten focuses on developing meaning for numbers by relating counting to the concept of cardinality—the number of objects in a group. But what does that mean? Children often first learn to count before they understand “how many” objects they are actually counting. For example, children may be able to count to 10 but, given 10 objects to count, they may count “9” or “12” because they are not pairing each number they say with only 1 object. These standards delineate the developmental progression to pairing numbers in the count sequence with objects in a group. (“Because I counted to 3, there are 3 objects here.”) This connection is of critical importance of all later work in math.

The standards in the CC domain are foundational skills and understandings that will prepare students for Operations & Algebraic Thinking (OA) and Numbers & Operations in Base Ten (NBT). Counting to tell “how many” are in a group of objects will lead them to understand addition and subtraction (and, later, multiplication and division), as well as understand how to decompose a number from 11-19 into 10 ones and some more ones.