My nearly 5-yr. old daughter is on Lesson 7 in Level A. She is able to show quantities up to 5 on her fingers, the abacus and with tally sticks, but is just not getting quantities 6-10. For example, I ask her to enter 7 and she tries to go through the "Yellow is the Sun" song to figure it out. Also if I show her 7 on my fingers or with tally sticks, she has no clue what it is. She resorts to counting. Is she supposed to master this concept before we move on to the next lessons or is it expected that she will just "get it" as we continue to work through the lessons? Any input would be SO appreciated. We are both starting to get very frustrated. When something is hard for her, she tends to shut down and I don't know how much I should try to push this issue.

Meagan,
I understand what you are talking about. My son first had problems too. I put the lessons aside and used the Right Start way of math in our everyday life. Especially with item less than 5. So we were setting the table and I would ask him how many forks I had. He would always start to count and I would have to remind him, "without counting" then he could almost always tell me. I found it was not so much that he was not getting it. It was just he thought counting was what I wanted him to do and I had to reprogram him to just look and see how many there were. Once we got passed that he had no problem moving on with the lessons. Since he is PreK, like your daughter, we have been moving very slowly.

HTH,
Cheri in TN