Pix for representational purposes only
Its amazing how naturally all these things come to us. But try explaining to a 5 year old what the logic is when you say 39 comes before 40. When you are faced with questions on how four and zero goes back and becomes three and nine, you will know what I mean. She already had 20 to 0 down pat as far as backward numbers was concerned, but when it came to understand what comes before 30, 20, 70 or any of these kinds of numbers it did not help to say -"4 and 0, when you see any number like this and you have to say the backward numbers, in place of 4 put 3 and in place of zero put 9" and then expect the little one to remember this for all these kinds of numbers.
Honestly I did try this at first but it did not work. And then one day long after she passed out of LKG and was on her summer holidays, the grandparents decided to get her a snakes and ladder game to play in the evenings. I realized that this was an ideal way to start small time revisions while playing. So each time we rolled the dice, I told her that she had to tell me the before and the after numbers and only then could she move forward. And she did. Of course she did get some of them wrong initially, but when you couple it with the fun of rolling a die and moving on numbers, she began to remember which number related to her winning and managed to pick up the sequence.Playing this once a day really helped and the little one has no idea that I am actually conning her n remembering her numbers.
