Number Charts

Just like learning colors is more that just knowing color names, understanding numbers is more than just saying, "One, two, three." Last year, an activity in Gavin's math book had him making a chart to learn the numbers 1 through ten. For the number 1, he glued one Cheerio on the line. For the number 2, he glued two Cheerios and so on. He liked the activity so much that we also made a poster for the numbers 11-20. This really helped him connect the written numeral with the amount it represented.

It wasn't long after he made these charts that he began to grasp the pattern of numbers. He realized that after twenty came twenty-one and then twenty-two and then twenty-three... and that the same pattern held for the thirties and forties...

He made it his personal goal to learn to count to one hundred. Since charts had worked so well before, I made him a chart with all the numbers 1 through 100. At first, he used it as a cheat sheet, but within a week, he could count to 100 without looking.


(Another fun tool we used was Five Little Monkeys Play Hide and Seek which has the mischievous monkeys counting to 104.)