Instructor Notes:

For materials preparations, click ‘Back to Main Menu’ button and select ‘Getting Started – EDC Setup’.

Read Every Day Counts Teacher’s Guide, Kanter and Gillespie, Great Source, 2005 or 2012 edition, p. 67-68.

As the Clip Collection keeps growing, it may surpass a quantity that some children are able to count. To accommodate a range of counting skills you might remove 3 or 4 of the chains once a week and play “How Many Now?” It is interesting to see who tries to count the lesser number of clips by tens and ones and who needs to count each paper clip.

Once we agree on the total, to observe children’s conservation of number, I sometimes break the chain up into chunks of five and leftovers or hook all the chains together and again ask, “How many now?”

I can see who understands the number of clips is the same no matter how they are arranged, and who needs to count again to be sure.

After the activity, I display the clips in chains of ten and leftovers and we guess how many more chains are needed get back to our Day of School number and then put enough chains back to match the numeral.