Teach Counting with a Numbered Fruit Salad

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This is one of those things that’s so easy, and so great, you just have to do it.

It’s extremely rare for me to have just my two youngest at home during meal preparation, but that’s what happened today. It was the perfect time to give my Two some one-on-one in the kitchen — and to teach counting as well.

After church we ran to the store (in 16°! Ack!) to get some strawberries and grapes so we’d have enough fruit to work with. Then I put fruit pieces in each of five bowls:

The numbers stand for how many of each type of fruit will go into each person’s fruit dish.

I pointed to the bowl of bananas labeled “1.”

“What number is this?”
“One!”
“Great! Can you put one banana in each bowl?

On to the strawberries…

“What number is this?”
“One!”

It turns out he thinks every number is a 1, which is why doing this sort of thing with him is important. And it’s also a good thing when his four-year-old brother isn’t around to supply all the answers.

My Two can count to 10 correctly, but he’s not good at one-to-one correspondence. This gave us a lot of practice with that. He loved the one-on-one time and was proud to say that he made the fruit salad. You can make this harder for older kids by writing the recipe on a sheet of paper instead of labeling each bowl (that was actually my original idea until I realized that this would be better for him).