Roll the Dice

For those of you that have a child (or children) that aren't big fans of sitting down and learning something new, don't be discouraged. My daughter is one of those...at least at this stage in her life. If she can have some creative freedom, she'll tolerate it. If I can sing it, she'll like it. But if it involves food, she's all over it. Begging for it. Ask her to count, and you may hear, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 16, 20, 19, 100..." (voice trailing off, somehow ending the sentence with a forward roll). Ask her to count jellybeans? A perfect and precise demonstration.
So about once a week, we use food to practice a skill.
I have a number of different kinds of dice. Any will do, though I do love dice with the physical numbers on them instead of the dots.

For young counters, it helps to either move the item they are counting physically. That helps prevent the double and triple counting. You know, when there are 5 jellybeans but somehow they counted 14? It gets a little confusing for kids, even through kindergarten, to try to count a group of items without forgetting which ones they've already counted.

Anyways, I have a poster board that has circles on it. Or you can put down a piece of construction paper and draw circles around the piles once they've counted them.

Materials: Dice, candy/cracker/something yummy

Activity:
Roll the dice. Say the number out loud, and practice counting the candy.
Once the correct number has been counted, put them in a pile and draw a circle around them.
Repeat! You can write the number in the circle if you want.

Easy activity, little preparation, and once they get the hang of it and learn a few numbers, they can do it independently. Yay!