Counting Up

We did a bit of number work this week. Munchkin is pretty clued up on almost every Capital letter in the alphabet.  We haven't worried about lower case letters just yet as they are harder to recognise (so many variations on them!).  But numbers are a different story.  While he can count quite happily, he doesn't really know any numeral except 2.  As we had some time at home, and he seemed keen on doing cutters with the playdough, we got into it.

Numbers 1-9 were lined up and cut out one by one, lined up again, and then we had some fun randomly standing them all up (seen below).

We added zero...trying to remember that we need to do that!  I explain zero as being nothing, and that it goes before number 1 when we line up all our numbers.  Munchkin still usually calls it 'O for Oh No' though!

Then I rolled balls of playdough to sit beside each number, the idea being to help him understand that this figure in front of him represents a number, i.e. a QUANTITYof something.

I know that's a really important concept for kids to get, so I'm hoping our short 'lesson' helped a little.  The attention span is not great, and I'm not trying to instigate any learning he isn't ready for, so a ten minute game like this is great before we moved onto making playdough roads for his cars.

Counting how many balls we have put in front of the number 5.

How do you/did you teach numeral recognition?

Amy