Counting Squares

Two big break-throughs with Silas this morning:

1. He willingly told me the shape we were working on (square).
2. He jumped into the activity without a single protest. (Usually he complains for about thirty seconds that he doesn't want to, and then gets into it.)

I'm beginning to believe that he just might outgrow his two-year-oldness after all. (That's easy for me to say right now, while he's sleeping. I might be singing a different tune, come dinner time . . . .)

I sort of made this activity up on my own, loosely based on some playdough mats I printed from some site or another several years ago. I traced around a square out of our color tiles (from the manipulatives kit for Saxon math K-3), then used that as a rough template to make more counting sheets.

Cheap paper, a marker, squares I already owned, one-to-one correspondence, number recognition, fine motor skills (in matching the tiles to the paper) . . . my kind of activity! And as a bonus, Owen decided going up to eight wasn't high enough, so he made three more sheets of his own, drawing his own squares (and a few diamonds) for nine, ten, and eleven. :)

Notice the backwards 9. That's Owen. :)