Eleventeen
Feb 23, 2025Both of my daughters love to swing, to the point that it’s a challenge to get them to engage in other activities at playgrounds!
On a recent outing to the park, I tried to ease my two-year-old Jonylah (Jo-NYE-lah) off of her swing, I said “I’ll swing you twenty more times before you get down.”
Jonylah began to recite the number sequence and made it accurately through ten, then continued on “eleventeen, twelveteen…”
The unexpectedness of hearing something other than “eleven” after ten made me laugh, and once we made it to 20th push, Jonylah did not easily or happily move on to another activity (imagine a stereotypical two-year-old tantrum and you’ve got the picture). The moment slipped from my mind in the handling of the resulting big toddler feelings and cries of “I don’t want to get down!”
Later though, I thought about this moment again and what it reveals about what Jonylah knows. As we get further into the English number sequence, we get to a repetitive pattern of a number followed by -teen (sixteen, seventeen).
Saying ten, then “eleventeen” is what as a teacher I would have classified as a brilliant mistake. Although incorrect, it shows that Jonylah has recognized a pattern and is attempting to apply it more widely - what a wonderful ability to already possess at the age of 2!
Do you remember learning to count? I doubt any adult does! I think that because we are so far away in time when we learned these skills, we think of counting as easy and straightforward. Once a skill becomes so deeply engrained in us, we can’t help but lose sight of its complexity. Let’s look at how complex it is to become what we can call a “conceptual counter.”
In order to master counting, there are multiple sub-skills that must be learned and connected, such as:
- Verbal number sequence (one, two, three, etc)
- Accounting for the actual quantity present
- Symbolic representation (the digits 0-9 that we use in our base-10 number system)
If you haven’t already, take a look at the “What’s Your Child’s Counting Stage?” guide to get a sense of the progression of counting skills.
With my own girls, I notice they don’t move through the stages in a perfectly linear path. Sometimes they show signs of being at a couple of stages at once, or sometimes they are at a stage but only up to a particular quantity - Jonylah’s one-to-one correspondence is solid up to 5 but gets spotty after that.
What stages are you seeing show up in your child right now? Pay attention to how they develop in the coming weeks and months!
