Daily math activity

Everyday, we count the number of days that we have school. Today was the 12th day. Connor has a chart that he writes the number on, another chart where he makes a tally mark (and then adds it up for the month), and then we do a little activity. We have 3 cups. One is a coin cup. Every day he drops a penny in the cup. When we reach 5, he trades his penny in for a nickel, then we continue with more pennies, and when we reach 10, he trades it infor a dime. We currently have a dime and two pennies to represent 12 days of school.

We also have a bean cup for place value. We have a "ones" cup and a "tens" cup so far. Everyday, Connor drops a bean in our ones cup. When we reached 10, we glued them onto a Popsicle stick to make 10, and put it in the "tens" cup. Then we continue to add one bean per day in the ones cup. When we reach 20 days of school, we will have two sticks in the tens cup. We also have number cards to show how it all comes together. Here is a picture from yesterday: 

From here, we show how place value works. And even though we did place value last year, it was fun to see it click again as he described it to me and even went on to say "100 has 3 spots! And one thousand has 4 spots!" He made me show him how many spots one million has! And then he excitedly asked me if could count to one hundred by himself (which he did). After this, we then use the number cards to show and write an addition equation: 10+1=11. This daily math activity just helps solidify understanding of numbers and how it all comes together! It takes time and it's separate from our regular math lesson, but I can really see it helping him!