Collect and Count Outside

• A Bucket

This was a fun one! Still has been really into rocks lately, and we’ve got a rock section on the side of our house so soon as I told him we could go outside and collect things. He went straight there. He slowly started to fill the bucket with large rocks and his time when I had to ask him if he was finished collecting he told me “mommy I strong I can fill the bucket.”

So I told him OK and he continued collecting. After a few minutes, he had an almost full bucket and I had told him that it was time to count them up! We’ve been working a lot lately on counting.

This is just another way that’s interesting and different for him to practice. A lot of times that’s all you really need to do for children is switch it up a bit and they don’t even realize what’s actually being learned in the moment. So once he finished collecting, he started unloading the rocks onto our stairs. Once he was finished unloading he went ahead and counted them up.

At first he was silently picking them up to count  so I went ahead and modeled the counting using 1 to 1 correspondence as we picked up each rock. Then he walked over to the smaller portion of our stairs (where he placed some) and I asked “what number comes first, one, then what?”

And then he went ahead and counted to five using one to one correspondence! Over these past few lessons he’s really gotten good at counting using one to one correspondence up to five so my next goal for him will be counting from 5 to 10 using to one correspondence.