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.