Devise one activity each to help the child understand 'as many as' and 'one-to-one correspondence'. Try them out on a child/children in your neighbourhood, and record your observations.
So far we have considered some examples of activities that you can devise to introduce and strengthen the concepts of classification, ordering and one-to-one correspondence. Here we would like to mention a point of caution! While organising such activities, it is important to be careful when setting them up. This is because we may inadvertently mislead the child as in the following example :
When talking about 'as long as', Dolly's teacher always used a rod for comparing with. Because of this, Dolly thought that the rod and 'as long as' are somehow related, and that 'as long as' can only be applied to that kind of rod.
Thus, while introducing a concept, we should devise as many different activities as possible with a variety of materials, so that children can correctly glean the concept and generalise it. For example, let children
encounter the term 'as long as' with reference to sticks, pencils, ribbons, spoons, blocks, ropes, in a variety of situations. Then, from these various experiences they will be able to draw out the meaning of 'as long as'. + Another point that we must keep in mind is that a child may not be able to perform a task simply because of language incompetence, and not cognitive incompetence. You can think of an example to illustrate this while doing the following exercises.