Ice Cream Cone Counting

Last weak Sweet Girl and I practiced counting and numbers. Sweet Girl loves letters. she knows almost all their names and a lot of their sounds, but she has almost no interest in numbers. When she sees numbers mixed in with her foam letters she either thinks they are letters (5 is S and 3 is E), or she ignores them and sets them aside. So, I have been trying to find some fun activities to get her interested in numbers and counting.

I pulled out our flannel board and made some ice cream cones and scoops out of felt. I made 5 cones so we could start practicing counting to 5. Let me clarify for a moment, Sweet Girl can count. In fact her counting is one of my favorite things about her. She can get all the way to 11, followed by 16 and eleventeen. Eleventeen is as high as she can count, which I think is pretty impressive. I've never counted clear to eleventeen before. Anyway, she can count, she just struggles with counting things. She doesn't quite grasp the concept of pointing to objects in an order and saying just one number. She usually just keeps counting and pointing all over until she decides that's enough.

For this activity we lined up the cones and then took turns placing scoops of ice cream on them and counting them. Sometimes I would tell her how many scoops to put on a cone and we would count them as she put them up. It was a lot of fun, and who doesn't love playing with a flannel board? I wish I could say that after 20 minutes of playing she is now a super counter, but that's okay because now we get to keep playing with them.