A fun and hands-on game for toddlers through to early school-age children. Practice counting, number recognition, number writing and more. Great for role-play and as a set up for learning centres and play-based curriculum. See the bottom for handy tips to simplify or extend to suit your children's level.
At age 3, my son does a lot of
rote counting (where he can recite numbers in order from memory) but he is still working on the
understanding of what numbers actually mean and represent. Properly understanding numbers, from the written symbol to the many different ways it can be represented is more important than rote-counting and takes multiple experiences over time to consolidate the understanding. Don't get me wrong, it's great if your child can count in order from memory, it's all part of the learning, but that doesn't mean that they understand numbers.
Understanding that a number (eg. three/3) represents a certain, consistent amount of something is a skill that children work on from early on. They are exposed to this kind of understanding through everyday life, like reading stories, (ie. Goldilocks and the
Three Bears), talking about family (ie. 3 people in your family), eating and preparing food (3 spoons of honey, 3 pieces of cheese, 3 triangles of sandwich, etc.), while out and about, (look, there are 3 ducks! 3 red cars in a row, etc.) and so on.
As well as through these natural occurrences, we can
set up experiences that allow children to practice working with numbers in fun and hands-on ways. The more children play with and are exposed the numbers, the greater their understanding will be. Having a solid foundational understanding of numbers 0 to 10 and what they represent is very important, as this is what your children will be building all their future mathematical knowledge and understanding upon.
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