I recently purchased a new rug for the playroom featuring a hopscotch board. I can envision so many ways we’ll use this in the future, including obviously as an indoor hopscotch mat. But as Veronika was playing with blocks today, I realized the mat will also be great for teaching numbers and counting practice with my toddler!

We’ve used her dump truck to clean up blocks before; now it was time to use the truck to bring them out for play. I ferried the blocks from where she’d been playing with them in the living room and she loved dumping them out atop the hopscotch rug.

Once we had enough blocks, I sat down with her at the beginning, next to number 1.

For each number, I named it and pointed to the symbol, and then built a block tower with the corresponding number of blocks. This was fun for her to watch because…

…the towers kept getting taller!

At first she helped build. Then she lost interest and wanted to play her own way with the blocks, which was fine. I kept naming the numbers and counting each tower of blocks out loud, knowing she was listening and absorbing.

As I neared the end with the towering skyscrapers of 8, 9, and 10, she suddenly was mesmerized.

As soon as 10 was finished, she trotted over and my baby Godzilla knocked down the whole block city!

This was a great way to introduce the notion that numbers get successively bigger as you count up 1 through 10. We’ll be building on our hopscotch mat again soon!