When children learn to sort items into groups and order objects along a particular dimension, they are gaining the basic insights that will help them learn to count. In the story of Johnny and the cookies, we see how easy it is for a child to be confused about the ordinal and cardinal meanings of numbers. An even more common problem that children have is to move from counting by rote to actually counting objects. Counting by rote or learning a number chant is easy for children. It is a social game that adults enjoy playing with them. Counting more than three objects, however, involves a. critical concept that is difficult for children to grasp: one-to-one correspondence. One-to-one correspondence means that each object or item is counted once and only once. If the teacher has to help the child count by placing the child’s finger on each item as it is counted, the child has not yet learned one-to-one correspondence