Understanding Number Concepts with Plastic Eggs

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Twelve mini plastic eggs, a marker, and some pennies made a fun game for my preschooler in her beginning effort to understand basic number concepts and numerical values. First, I labeled the mini-eggs from 1 to 12 with a marker. Some of them already had a number sticker on them: I cannot recall what they had been previously used for, but the game was already started for me! Then, I counted out the appropriate number of pennies for each egg, to correspond to the number written on it. My daughter loved shaking the eggs.  She quickly found that some of them were heavier and made more noise than others. After we shook one, we would open the egg and count the pennies inside. She even liked to make the pennies cluck like chicks when we helped them "hatch." Playing with these eggs taught my daughter a few basic numerical concepts.

• Counting upward means adding more.
• Some numbers indicate "more" than others.
• Comparing eggs could be done by weight, shake/noise, and by opening them up and counting the pennies.
• Recognizing the numbers on the eggs and comparing them to the more/less of other numbers.

Strawberry is still quite young to understand the concepts of greater than and less than and although she can recognize a few of the numerals, to her the 8 is still "the one with two circles" and the 11 is "the one with two ones." Our numbers with plastic eggs activity is a simple one. Nevertheless, being exposed to the different numbers has certainly helped her become more familiar with numerical concepts. Playing with penny-filled eggs was certainly a fun way to begin comparing numerical values and playing with numbers in general!