Let's take time this Memorial Day to remember what it's all about. Although it may be the unofficial start to summer, Memorial Day is a time to reflect, remember and be forever grateful to all of those individuals who lost their lives in the United States Armed Forces.  Read more about Memorial Day from Washington DC guide Rachel Cooper to find out everything you should know about Memorial Day 2013.

Learning to count is much more difficult than one would think. Of course, we all learned to count and it's doubtful that any of actually remember what that process was really all about because it was so long ago.  Once the principles of counting are fully understood, there are a wealth of resources here to take the learner to the next step in counting:

• Hundred's Chart Worksheets
• Numberlines Focusing on Counting up to 10
• What Comes Before and What Comes After Worksheets
• Ordinal Number Worksheets
• Counting by 10's
• Greater or Less than 20

These are just a few worksheets and printables to help with counting. Remember, use concrete manipulatives and one to one finger pointing (touching) when teaching young learners to count.

In the Common Core Standards, kindergarten learners are to count to 100 by ones and by tens. This is a concept that often takes longer than a year to learn.  In the Common Core, it's called Counting and Cardinality. Cardinality refers to the ability of recognizing that four things is represented by the number 4 or that the last number in a set refers to the actual amount.  To support the kindergarten learner, many concrete experiences are needed. This week, I focused on how to support teaching counting to kindergarten learners in order to support the Common Core Standards in Kindergarten.

Number fluency at an early age refers to a full understanding of the principles of counting. Knowing everthing that a number represents. For instance, let's take six. It means know that 6 means 6 of something that's it's less than any number greater than 6 and more than every number less than 6. It means knowing that in a line up or on a number, there is a 6th place. It's knowing that it can refer to 6 concrete items (buttons, cars, coins etc.) or 6 abstract items (6 breaths, 6 thoughts, 6 ideas etc.) It's knowing where 6 is placed on a number line. Research has indicated that children who lack number fluency in the first grade tended to lag by the 7th grade, were behind their peers and lacked the basic math skills required to function as an adult. More on this story.