Counting + Number Recognition Activity

It’s back to school time!  Everyone settling back into your school schedules nicely?  I hope so.  It’s a bitter sweet time, isn’t it?  I hate to see Summer go, but so love the earlier bedtime routine :).  I now have a first grader and two little ones at home, they are 3½ and 1 (this week!).  My 3 year old has been begging to go to preschool this year.  With two more years until she starts kindergarten I’m going to wait another year – but I’ve promised her that we’d do fun preschool activities every week.  I’ll be sharing ideas and looking for ideas so if you have any fabulous ones, do share!  First up, a fun counting and number recognition game, I’ll see you after the jump!
My daughter struggles recognizing numbers so we’ve done this activity a few times and she loves it.  It involves counting, number recognition, and eating (this is by far her favorite part!).

Supplies:

• egg carton and sharpie
• number puzzle or any kind of numbers that you have or can make
• items to count, 1-9 of them (i.e. 1 marshmallow, 2 corn kernals, 3 pretzels, etc. I used half food items)

To get set up for the activity I washed my egg carton well because of the food items.  After drying it, I used the sharpie to write the numbers 1-9.  I collected all the items and put them in the lid of the egg carton and laid out all the number puzzle pieces.

I let her choose which item she wanted to count first.  The tricky part?  Not eating them…just yet!

She would count the items then find the number in the egg carton, put the items in that slot, and then find the puzzle piece that is the number.  Once she masters those numbers I plan to make a new one with higher numbers and just make my own numbers instead of using a puzzle.

See, who needs preschool, we’ve got this, right?  I hope your little ones enjoy it as much as mine.  Looks like we’ll be doing it again today.  My daughter just looked over my shoulder to see what I was doing and saw the pictures and said, “I want to do that again!” 

I hope ya’ll are having a great first few days of school!  I hate for summer to end but it’s so nice to get back into a good routine with bedtime.  I’ve been way to lenient with late nights…that’s what happens when you are away from home for a month and staying with family.  We get a chance to do it every Summer, and my girls just love it.  So fun!  I hope that you all had a wonderful summer!

We’ll see you next week,

Aubrey

Tagged as: preschool