Learn
Teach it outside, where the numbers are real
A nature lesson does not need invented material. The sun was up for a particular number of hours today. The first frost is a particular number of days away. A particular number of living things have been photographed within forty kilometres of you this month. Every one of those is a counting problem, and every one of them is true — which is what makes it worth a child’s attention.
Everything here is written three times over, for a two-year-old, a four-year-old and a six-year-old, because those are not three difficulties of the same task. They are three different tasks that share a field, an hour and a bucket of acorns.
Three rungs
Ages are a rough guide and children are not their ages. Pick by what they can do, not by their birthday.
2
Point and name
One, two, three. Pointing at one thing at a time.
Subitising — seeing that a group is two without counting it — and the idea that a number word belongs to a thing you are touching.
4
Count and compare
Counting a real group to ten or twenty, and saying which is more.
One-to-one correspondence: one number word per object, the last word you said is how many there were. Then more, fewer, and the same.
6
Tally and figure
Tally marks, counting in twos and fives, and taking one number from another.
Grouping as a way of counting past what fingers hold, and subtraction as the distance between two numbers rather than a taking-away.
Plan it
The season plan
Eight weeks, ordered by what your own year is doing — your town’s frost date, the minutes of daylight going, the full moon. Acorns are down for five weeks and the date moves by a fortnight across one province; a template cannot know that and this does.
Each child
The ladder and the badges
Numeracy in the order it actually develops, with what to watch for. Badges earned off real counts written in the journal — none of them can be got by tapping a screen.
12 lessons
Lessons by theme
Each one is an hour outside and five minutes on a screen, in that order. What to bring, what to do, and the actual words to say to each child.
Shapes
Patterns and shapes
Petal counts, leaf symmetry and the spirals on a pine cone — the arithmetic that turns up in how things grow, with something to hunt for on every walk.
Keep it
The field journal
What they counted, when, and where. Kept in this browser, on this device, and never sent anywhere. In a year it is a record of your own patch that no book contains.
The rule, every time
We look, we count and we put it back. Nothing goes in a mouth — not a berry, not a mushroom, not a leaf. That is the whole rule, and it is the same rule every time.
The foraging half of this site is written for adults who have decided to learn identification properly. The teaching half is not, and never will be: no page here tells a child that anything growing wild is safe to eat, and no photograph — including the ones on this site — is ever enough to identify a plant or a mushroom. Counting is the better lesson at these ages anyway. A child who has counted four hundred mushrooms and eaten none of them knows more about mushrooms than one who has eaten one.
What there is to teach
Counting
One number word per thing, and what to do when there are more things than fingers.
Shapes and patterns
Symmetry, repeats and spirals — the arithmetic that shows up in how things grow.
- Count the petalsCounting small sets accurately, then noticing that a set of counts has a pattern in it.
- Fold a leaf in halfSymmetry, matching, and the idea that two halves can be the same shape and opposite hands.
- Patterns in bark and stoneRepeating units — AB, ABB, ABC — which is where algebra quietly begins.
Time and the sky
Days, nights and months, counted rather than told.
- The shadow clockMeasuring the same thing repeatedly, comparing lengths, and reading a sequence of numbers as a shape.
- A month of moonsCounting a long sequence, keeping a record, and meeting a cycle that is not seven days long.
- Counting down to frostCounting down, subtraction as distance, and what an average actually promises.
Living things
Legs, wings and how many of each — counting that arrives with its own multiplication table.
Measuring
Longer, heavier, deeper, and the numbers that settle an argument about it.
The world it is all about
The rest of the site, which is where the lessons get their facts. Written for adults, but a six-year-old will happily sit through the rock diagrams.