Counting Stairs

• Any Stairs!

We have a ton of steps to get up to our front door from our driveway! I took this opportunity to improve Theos one to one correspondence counting. He’s wonderful at counting with his fingers but I figured I’d switch it up a bit.

I first started with a larger portion of our stairs, and I asked him if he could help me count them as we walk up. Immediately he started stepping on each very quickly and counting as fast as he could, and counting out of order. Now that he look at it I think I gave him too much to count at once, especially when we’re trying something new. So I then modeled what I meant with those stairs and I counted each one as I stepped on them.

I then moved to the smaller portion of our steps that lead to the front door, there’s only four steps in this chunk. Since I was able to show him how slowly I walked as I counted, placing 1 foot on a step each time I said a number he quickly manage to do that with less stairs. He did all four correctly!

A few things I should’ve looked at prior to this activity was if he understood what I said when I gave him the direction, if this number of steps were too overwhelming for him, and how much of this activity did he really grasp with me, just telling him instead of modeling it. Even if you have to model on direction the activity is still meaningful!