Snowflake Counting with Milk Cap Numbers

Sweet Pea is 33 months old.

From: After creating the milk cap numbers, this was the first activity I devised to go with them.  We did not have a whole lot of luck with these worksheets, but I wanted to post them because I thought that they might be useful for other tots.

Material:

• Milk cap numbers 1 through 6 (Instructions and templates located here).
• MCN Snowflake Strips 3-5-4.
• MCN Snowflake Strips 1-6-2.
• Colored pencils (optional).
• A laminator or press and seal lamination pockets (optional).

Observations: To be honest, this did not work at all.  I think that if Sweet Pea was older and had a better grasp on numbers it would have been a good activity, but she just ended up revealing her numerical inadequacy.

I presented Sweet Pea with an individual strip of snowflakes and had her try to put the number cap letters on each strip in order.  She understood pretty well up to the strip with 3 snowflakes.

And then things got a little out of order…

She had a really good time doing these, and as you can see, worked very hard on them.  However, no amount of gentle suggestion could get her to put the numbers in their correct places.

I don’t like doing a lot of correction, so I let her continue working.  I held my hands in fists in my lap to keep from grabbing the number caps out of her hands and putting them in the right order .   I kept inwardly cringing and  thinking, “I bet this is doing more harm than good.”

In retrospect, I can clearly see that she wasn’t ready for these at all.  I  put them away and will maybe bring them back out in a few months.  I might also try writing the numbers inside each circle to make more of a matching exercise, since filling in a blank number line is obviously a bit of baby rocket science at this age.

Notes from the Trenches: This entire post really felt like a “Notes from the Trenches.”

Rating: 1 Stars * (Fun )