Students in Ms. Thompson's class sorted their bag of gummy bears by color. The students organized their gummy bears on their papers to make the tallying easier. They used one-to-one correspondence to tally the number of each color of gummy bear they received. Finally, they counted all of the tallies to come up with the total number of gummy bears, which they wrote as a cardinal number (on the left, 16 in all).

This activity clearly shows students moving from a concrete representation (the gummy bears) to pictorial and abstract representations (the tallies and the cardinal number) to show whole number values. Students can also compare their data with that of a classmate.