Pre-school education offers the child an environment in which he learns about the world and gains a variety of experiences in different fields of life. Along with play and different activities, a child gets to know and gains his first experience in the field of mathematics. At first, these are simple activities, such as editing and sorting. Later, these activities become more complex, such as learning numbers, counting, and then solving basic arithmetic operations. The very skill of counting represents an important building block of later mathematical abilities and skills. Through the bachelor’s thesis, we wanted to determine the importance of counting for understanding arithmetic operations in the preschool period. In the theoretical part, we presented natural numbers and the number zero, examined the counting of children in the preschool period, and described the principles of counting and basic arithmetic operations by which a preschool child already operates. In the empirical part, in the group of preschool children aged 5-6, we researched the extent to which preschool children will follow the principles of counting and what influence the level of their understanding of counting will have on the success of solving the tasks in addition, subtraction, identity, and reversibility. We also checked the performance of children in solving addition and subtraction tasks, as well as the impact of subsidization on their calculation performance. We ascertained by the research that understanding counting conditions understanding basic arithmetic operations. If a child achieved good results in counting, he also achieved good results in arithmetic operations and vice versa. In understanding the addition, the researched sample of children recorded good results. Children recorded the best results in addition with concrete illustrations and addition with the number zero. The understanding of subtraction is less assimilated in the participating children in comparison with the understanding of addition. The sample of children researched records the best results in the subtraction with the number zero. We ascertained that the ability to add without concrete illustrations in children is more assimilated than the ability to subtract without concrete illustrations. Better results in addition and subtraction are recorded by children who subitize to a greater number.
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