Hands-On One-to-One Correspondence Activities for Homeschool Preschool Math (Week 5)

This week, we will revisit the concept of one-to-one correspondence in math briefly and talk to you just a little bit more about it. It's so incredibly important to build those foundational math skills. It's very easy to do if you know what you're doing, what activities to focus on, and how to mix them together. I also wanted to offer you a few additional ideas for ways to keep it fresh and fun, and continue to work on one-to-one correspondence.

What is the learning objective of one-to-one correspondence?

One-to-one correspondence is the idea that numbers stand for a certain quantity of things. When practicing one-to-one correspondence, children will count objects. As they count objects, they will touch each object once while assigning a number to it.

Often, when we teach counting, you'll hear little songs designed to teach it, or we practice counting verbally. We often end up teaching it very much in the same way that you would teach a nursery rhyme or the alphabet.

The problem is that when you teach counting only in that way, either by counting a limited variety of objects or when you're focused on counting verbally or written numbers, children often confuse it in their minds with learning a nursery rhyme. It is a series of words that you say rather than grasping the foundational concept that these are amounts of a specific thing. 

What is an example of one-to-one correspondence in preschool?

For example, the symbol five, whether it's the word we say or the written numeral five, stands for five things, and that's a very abstract concept because it can apply to anything.

It can be: 

• five ideas
• five cookies 
• five cars 
• five shoes 
• Or five thoughts that you think

It can be five of anything, but five is always five, and it's always that quantity. 

So that's what you're trying to do with one-to-one correspondence. Help your child understand that each of these numbers that they say stands for a certain quantity of things, no matter what you apply it to. Five will always mean five, six will always mean six, and as you go up in the pattern, each number stands for one more than the previous. 

What to keep in mind when teaching one-to-one correspondence?

You don't have to teach this explicitly. Children learn this implicitly by just focusing on counting a wide variety of objects. I've seen a couple of moms have difficulty because they have their routine, and they teach counting with the same objects each time.

For instance, while they're getting their child dressed, their child might have a poster on their bedroom wall with teddy bears lined up. So, every day, they're going to practice counting, and as they adjust their child, they count the teddy bears. This is a wonderful thing to do.

But if you're not careful to count a wide variety of things, then you're only using one particular thing like that. Then children can very easily develop the impression that, for instance, five stands for that blue teddy bear, which is the fifth in line. Instead, they need to understand that five is the fifth of anything that I'm counting. We could count the teddy bears in a different order, and the fifth bear would be a different one in line.

One-to-one correspondence activities

Five stands for a quantity of things that comes after four and before six. There are a lot of ways to work this into your everyday routine besides counting just simply a wide variety of different objects. 

Dice

Dice is a fantastic tool for this. Children begin to quantify the dots, which will come in handy later in math when they're working on worksheets and addition. Working with dots helps children visualize at least up to six, which is the maximum number on the standard dice. They will understand what one, two, three, or five looks like because they see that number of dots on the dice. 

Dominoes

Similarly dominoes. If you play with dominoes with the dots, it's a matching game where they're matching up the tiles with the same number of dots. It’s a fantastic tool to use for one-to-one correspondence.

Matching game

Anything that matches a quantity with a number is also a fantastic game. Now that you've been working on number recognition for a while, maybe your child is really comfortable with recognizing the numbers 1 through 10; you can begin to use that to your advantage for one-to-one correspondence. 

One of my favorite games is to take the plastic eggs that you would find at Easter time. You can write a different number with a marker on each egg from one to seven. You want to ensure that these are numbers your child is comfortable recognizing. 

You can then do it in a couple of different ways. You can either pre-fill them with a certain amount of something, such as cereal pieces, or any other small item, and then have your child open them and count them.

Or, a little more advanced, have your child fill them with that number of items. So, you are going to dump a pile of cereal on the table or put it in a bowl and have your child put two pieces in the egg that has '2' written on it and five pieces in the egg that has '5' written on it. 

So it's not only reinforcing counting and number recognition, but it's also reinforcing that one-to-one correspondence of that five. It is symbolized by this symbol that's written on this egg, and it means five of some particular item. And again, you can switch up the items that you're putting in the eggs if you want to help, just further reinforce that concept. 

Counting in sequence

If you do count things in a sequence, for instance, line up toy cars and count the cars.

You might have 10 cars in a row, and then show your child how you can rearrange the cars in a totally different order and count them again. It will still be 10, and the order doesn't matter. It's the amount that matters. 

Again, that will help to avoid confusion and some of the pitfalls that come with counting the same thing in the same order every time. It really helps to just ingrain the concept of one-to-one correspondence in your child's mind without needing to explicitly explain this concept to them. 

And once your child has a really strong grasp of this and they have an opportunity to practice, particularly with objects that come in sets of 10 and under, or when they're a little bit older, 20 and under, it's going to help them pick up on addition and subtraction just naturally and much faster. Many parents attempt to teach one-to-one correspondence in a very abstract way, when children are too focused on simply repeating numbers and counting them in sequence, without a solid foundation of what that means in the physical world. 

What do those numbers stand for?

Once these children get to addition and subtraction, it's a very abstract concept. They're dealing with symbols on a page without a really deep grasp of what those symbols stand for and that they're real things in real space. 

By really working on one-to-one correspondence, they will naturally see how two and three come together to make five. It's definitely well worth taking the time to really get that down, and yes, it will pay off big time in the future, for kindergarten and beyond.