Number sequences

Pix for representational purposes only

My daughter talks a lot and her volley of questions can be really difficult to handle. So naturally when it came to numbers, logic always seem to slip away by her as to how 11 came after 12 and 31 came after 30. Its only when I sat down with her to try and explain things about sequences, that I realized 5-year-olds just can't grasp why 11 comes after 12 and why 31 comes after 30. Think about it.. can you come up with one sane explanation?

So the only thing that I could think of was bringing out the Housie game that we had inside and give her the bag of 90 coins. I just told her to pick a coin and place it on the board. It took a long while, but once she was done, I asked her to find all the ones (1, 11, 21, 31..) and then told her to find all the 10s (10, 20, 30...) AND THEN... whew! showed her how 11 comes after 12 and 31 comes 30..

The board helped her see an order in the way numbers are placed and soon she was able to put 2 and 2 together literally. And with that we had the number sequencing done. What I didn't realize then is that it also helped with the backward numbers and before after numbers that she was going to learn next.

Backward numbers was just about reading the board the other way round... but before/after numbers unbelievably turned out to be a whole new ball game. 

Writing in Mirror Images

One of the first things I noticed when the little one started writing her first alphabets and numbers was her tendency to write mirror images - 3 would be E, C would be turned around, b would d and so on. It worried me for quite a while. I am one of those mothers who is hooked on to Google (being a journalist makes it a career for me) and all those articles I have read of autism, attention deficiency, compulsive this and compulsive that kind of freaked me out.

So what I did is sat down with my daughter's earlier Montessori teacher and tried to understand what exactly is the deal. She explained to me that structured learning, especially for a child who has come out of the Montessori style of learning can take a bit of getting used to. Its the same case with a child who may have come out of those rote-learning places as well. Just because your child writes a few letters the other way round does not mean there is something wrong with her. It just means she is experimenting with all that she is learning and wants to know why 3 can't be E or the other way round.

What worked for me was a kind of sequencing of numbers. So I told her something to the effect of "1 2 3 face one way because they play together - 4 5 6 look the other way till 1 2 and 3 are ready... that's why 7 looks at 6, 8 sits with a big face, 9 makes a bubble which bursts into a 1 and 0 making 10.

Not saying that this worked miracles the first time round, but it helped get her attention and helped her view numbers in a more playful manner. She took a while getting the sequence right, which is natural. It can get very annoying a times when the mirror images come back after a day or two of not practicing, but then we must remember that we have almost several generations worth of practice behind us and they are just starting.

I tried not to make something like a "study time" but included number games at times when she was most pliable. For us it was bath time - so  1- 10 magnets in her bath tub to play around with worked. Teaching her to play UNO and recognizing the difference between 6 and 9 because of the line worked. Air writing worked well for me too.