How children really learn to count
Somewhere around the second birthday, most children start to chant: "one, two, three, four, five!" It is a proud moment, but that chant is a song, not counting yet.
When we curate toys for numeracy, we look for the same two things every time: quantity before symbol, and concrete before abstract. This guide follows that road from the first "one" to one hundred.
Counting is not reciting
Real counting rests on a skill with an unglamorous name: one-to-one correspondence, one number word for one touched object. Ask for five blocks and a child who chants to twenty may count to eight, because the song runs faster than the finger.
You need no materials for this stage, just slowness. Count stairs while climbing them, carrots going into the pan, buttons as they close, touching each one as you name it. The day your child insists on doing the touching, the skill has arrived.
Quantity first, then the symbol
An amount is real: a child can hold three and feel that it is more than two. The digit "3" is just ink, and attached too early it becomes a shape without meaning. So keep this stage physical. Stack, thread, sort and hand over amounts: "give me two", "one more", "now we have four".
Marrying quantity and symbol
Once your child counts small amounts reliably, the written numeral earns its place. Lay numeral cards out in order and count something real beneath each one. Tracing belongs here too: running a finger along a digit before writing it with a pencil lets the hand learn its shape, not just the eye.
The teens are the hard part (and Dutch makes it harder)
"Eleven" and "twaalf" give no hint that they mean ten-and-one and ten-and-two. Dutch adds a famous trap: we say the units first. Vierentwintig is four-and-twenty, so a child hears "vier" and writes 42. If yours does this, celebrate it: they are listening carefully. The fix is to make ten visible. Show fourteen as a full row of ten and four more, every time, until the child sees through the word to the structure behind it.
🧮 The counting frame
Our Counting Frame holds ten beads per row, split by colour into five and five, so "fourteen" becomes something you can slide: one full row, then four. Fittingly, this frame (the rekenrek) is a Dutch invention.
The map of numberland
Around age four and a half to six, once counting to twenty is secure, a hundred chart changes the game. Ten rows of ten, always in the same place, so the patterns of our number system sit in plain sight. It is a map, not a lesson: it lets a child look things up and check their own work. Hang it at your child's eye height, not yours.
Print it for free, or get it as an A2 poster from our shop.
- Find it (4½+): "Can you find 47?" Start with numbers that belong to someone: their age, your house number.
- Before, after, between (5+): "What comes just before 30?" Every answer can be checked by looking.
- Walk a column (5½+): read 4, 14, 24, 34 straight down. The units hold still while the tens climb.
- Paint with buttons: cover every second number and stripes appear. Every fifth makes columns, every third a diagonal staircase.
🎁 Free printables
The hundred chart, practice grids in three levels, a quantity chart for 1 to 10 and ten number cards are all on our free printables page.
Try the 55 button trick. Lay the cards 1 to 10 in a row and count out exactly 55 buttons together. Place the right amount under each card, in pairs. If every card is right, the buttons come out exactly even. If any are left over, or the ten comes up short, a mistake is hiding on the mat for your child to find.
Looking to bring counting home? Visit our Amsterdam store or browse our collection.