In Reception, the children continue to engage with activities that draw attention to the purpose of counting - to find out how many objects there are. They remember the "stopping number" and that it tells us how many we need altogether, they begin recognise numerals to 5 and match them to objects. The children also develop their understanding of cardinality - that the last number in the count tells us "how many" things there are altogether. 

As the children progress through Reception, these counting skills will allow the children to count out a small set of objects from  a larger set and count things that cannot be seen (e.g how many notes were played on a piano).