All About My Family: Draw and Count

The top third of this kindergarten page is one wide dashed box labeled Draw your family. Under it are four numbered cards: People in my family, Brothers, Sisters and Pets. Each card holds an empty ten-frame, two rows of five cells, and a dashed square in its corner for a numeral. The child draws the family first, then fills one cell of the ten-frame for each person, brother, sister or pet, and writes how many in the square. A child with no pets leaves that frame empty and writes 0, which is a real answer on this page.

The counting here is of something the child knows better than anything else, and that is the point: the number is not read off printed dots but produced from memory, then shown on the frame and written as a numeral, three representations of one quantity. The four categories overlap, since brothers and sisters are also people, and a child who notices that has understood something about sets. Zero is allowed and expected for at least one card in most families, which makes this one of the few pages where a kindergartner writes 0 for a reason. The teacher compares the drawing with the People frame: they should agree.

A one-sheet portrait print that works in black and white. Do it as a talking page, with the child naming everyone in the drawing before counting. The all about me base page has a smaller family box with no counting, and the my name page is the family's other counting face, where the child counts letters instead of people. Printed dots to count are the counting-frames family, not this one.