Car Counting

My youngest son is completely UN-interested in numbers--this frustrates me, slightly. Therefore, I've been trying to find something to interest him that will help expose him to numbers and hopefully get some recognition going on. We've done this activity three times this week, but I've yet to determine it's effectiveness. I'll let you know.

It's easy to prepare. I draw a parking lot on black construction paper with a white crayon and label the parking spots with numbers 1-10 (you could certainly do a different set of numbers, whatever you want to work on). Then I tell the kids to get 10 cars and line them up in "traffic."

The first time I did this activity, I just called out a number and the kids would park their cars in that number's space.

But it somehow evolved into my telling 10 little stories, with 10 protagonist drivers that are trying to get to various places represented by 10 different parking spaces.

Examples:

• A man trying to get his sick dog to the vet in space #3.
• An old person forgot their pills and had to run home to space #5 to get them.
• A mom and all her kids were going to the grocery store in space #10.

You get the drift. Anyway, the kids both enjoy this one, and I'm hoping it's helping.