1 is a Number
Feb 09, 2025On a recent night, my daughter Jonylah (almost 3) spotted the number 1 in one of the pictures in the bedtime story we were reading, Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks. She pointed to the digit and asked “what’s that letter?”
My first reaction was surprise at her mistake!
As adults, the difference between letters and numbers is so obvious we never think about - until a moment like this causes stops us in our tracks.
We paused the story. “That is the number one.” She repeated me, saying, “One.”
Jonylah then pointed back to all the letters on these two pages, asking me what each one was. I named them, and then she pointed back to the Q, R, S, and the 1, proudly naming each one again.
The next night, Jonylah wanted to read the classic book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We have a copy of this book in English and another in Japanese, and when we finished the English one, she asked to read the Japanese version - one of her many clever tactics for stalling bedtime!
I told her I didn’t know how to read it, and she said, “Me either.” However, she has much of the English version memorized, so she was able to recite more of it than I could as we turned through the pages of the Japanese copy.
This moment helped me step into Jonylah’s metaphorical shoes. I knew the symbols on the pages represented words and numbers, but I didn't know enough to make any sense of them. This must be what it's like to learn about the world as a toddler!
Many of the math moments in our household pop up during the story-reading phase of our bedtime routine. If this routine sounds familiar, keep an eye out for natural opportunities to interact with numbers and counting.
