Siena is a real counting champ now. Given a set of similar objects, she can pretty reliably determine the cardinality of the set, up to 10 or so.

We’ve also been working on getting to 20, but there are some problems there.

The process we took was, after she could count 1 to 10 (not counting per se so much as reciting the sounds of counting 1 to 10; this was a year ago before she understood the “counting stuff” concept), we’d have her count to 10, and then I’d say “eleven!” Eventually she would get to 10 and then automatically say eleven, too. Then I would just continue counting up to 20.

One day she counted to 10 and then kept going…

10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20!

Hmm, you missed two there, champ. Always 13 and 16, she’d skip right over. So I would try to help:

Siena: 11, 12

Daddy: 13

Siena: 15, 17, 18, 19, 20!

Ok, so she would skip 14. She maybe thought I was saying 14 and so went on to the next one as her little brain perceived it.

I never really solved the problem of 13, but at some point in the past month or so, she has started throwing it into the mix, so now she’s only leaving out 16 on her path from 1 to 20.

Maybe she’s trying to tell us that we’ll want to just skip right by her 16th year?