I love when kids invent their own learning activities. Somehow they always have the most brilliant ideas for how to become even more brilliant.
My son invented this super easy activity. He was playing the the buttons on the side of the tv, when GASP!, a beautiful photo of a jellyfish popped up. Obviously fascinated, he continued to stare until GASP!, a few seconds later it turned into a photo of an adorable cabin next to a lake. After a few photos, his attention shifted to the numbers on the screen. “Six-one-five. Mommy. It says six-one-five.” At this point, he could only count from 1-10. That was all about to change!
The time changed to 6:16. “Mommy! Mommy! Now it says six-one-six.”
I had an idea. “That’s right! What comes after six?”
“Seven!” Imagine his delight when his guess was confirmed by the magic TV photo just seconds later! “What comes after seven?” We kept going and going. After a few days of playing this game (as well as showing him 11-20 in other settings), I started modifying my responses to see if he could read the time as is and count higher numbers. When he said things like,”It says four-one-one,” I would reply, “Yep! It says four-eleven!” It took him a a little bit, but the more we practiced with this and our other counting games, the more he picked it up!
We’ve been playing this game for a few months, and now that he has 1-20 down, he’s even started naming some numbers from 20-59! Staring at a number chart that lists 1-100 can be overwhelming, but this activity is a fun way to start practicing number recognition with those higher numbers one at time.
Check out a short video of us playing right here!
