how to teach number recognition to toddlers Archives

We made a Little Blue Truck’s Christmas Craft to go along with the book. My kiddos have been having so much fun delivering trees. Make it too!

December is my favorite month of the year. I love the decorations and the activities. I love the hot cocoa and lights. It’s so cheery.

We started our advent activities yesterday. I made some cards, printed them out, laminated them and cut them to size. We are drawing one card a day and doing that activity. If you’d like a set, you can get them as a thank you for signing up for my newsletter: FREE Christmas Advent Activity Cards.

One of the activities is to read Christmas books. So, today we’re reading Little Blue Truck’s Christmas (aff).

I love that the book has counting in it. I can teach my son to count and how to do some subtraction. It’s an easy read. So, my son can retell the story to me too! By kindergarten, children will be asked to retell the main points of a story.

If you haven’t noticed yet (tehe), my friend Beth (from Days with Grey) and I have been teaming up each month to provide a book and a craft/activity that you can do with your kiddos to help prepare them for story retelling.

They absolutely don’t have to master the skill now. But, introducing them to the idea is a great way for them to have a great kindergarten year.

You can see a couple of our past Book Box Story Retells here: Room on The Broom, Dragons Love Tacos, The Watermelon Seed.

But, back to Little Blue Truck’s Christmas. If your kiddos love trucks, farm animals and lights, they’re going to love this book. The very last tree lights up. My kiddos just love it (so much so they kept turning to that page)!

I thought counting trees and a cardboard truck craft would go along with the book. We set out our toy farm animals and delivered a tree to each animal while I read the book to them. I hope you enjoy doing the craft too!

We have been learning S is for Snow and counting snowballs. It is so fun especially when the setup is so simple! Try Snowball Counting too!

We have been learning the letter S for the past week here at home. Especially S is for Snow. We really wished it snowed here, so we could play in the snow, build snowmen, and look at snowflakes.

But, we don’t have snow (sad face). So, we made our own using conditioner and baking soda. It was a simple recipe: just a half cup of conditioner mixed with 2 cups baking soda. Voila! Snow! We made mini snowmen and drew the letter S in the snow. So, fun. It got pretty messy when the kiddos decided to have a snow ball fight. But, we all got a broom and swept it up. No biggie.

Let them play, right?!

We also made salt dough ornaments. They’re sitting on the counter for us to paint. We have snowflakes and snowmen. I hope they make it to the Christmas tree.

We even checked out a couple books from the library (they’re pretty affordable on Amazon. We just might add them to our library permanently. Here are a couple affiliate links for your convenience. It doesn’t raise the price for you at all: Snow and Little Snow Ghosts).

So, before the snow activities we read these books and I have my son find the letter S on the covers. If he wants, he finds the S’s on the pages. It’s great letter recognition practice!

One of the S activities my son enjoyed was Snowball Counting. It’s so simple. It helps your kiddo recognize numbers 1-10 and even introduce them to a little bit of addition, subtraction and counting.