Miss Oh Waily has been interested in numbers for some time. But quite how to bring that interest out in an activity is the harder thing. Then along came Montessori Print Shop with a freebie activity to download. I’ve had it sitting and waiting for some time and finally made it up (printed & laminated it) a few weeks ago.
I’ve been trying since then to see if she would be interested in playing with it and this past week we have finally reached that point.
Let me apologise at the beginning for the photographs. We seem to have fallen into the habit of playing this at night before stories and bedtime. That makes for difficult photographic conditions, at least for me and my old clunker.
Here are the starting headers:

Here’s the Miss getting some Lumpy assistance:

Here’s what it begins to look like:

And what the end result should look like more or less:

And the congratulatory hugs from Sneezy at the end:

The download came with red counters (dots) and with other images to make up the numbers. I thought we would start simple and then see how things went so, as you can see, we did the counter version.
As a game I thought Miss Oh would struggle with matching the written word to the appropriate number and while she isn’t an absolute star at it, she manages just fine most of the time.
We’ve made this a game by taking turns to place down a card and we take turns with who has which cards (counters, numbers, words) and who starts.
We have a further variation that doesn’t involve laying the cards down in a line but works like a very simple version of snap. I put down a card and Miss Oh has to put down her version of it. Unlike the lines, I have made this a random choice (well, mostly random) so she can’t just work on the pattern recognition from 1 to 10.
Now we just have to see how long this interest will last and whether I need to figure out how to extend it.
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