A Cookie Jar of Numbers — Jin's First 1 to 20

Jin has fallen in love with counting lately. She learned the numbers from 1 to 20 in the first term of Year 1, and watching her — a child who used to muddle even 1 to 10 before she started school — now sail through the teens with ease, I'm reminded how patiently school learning unfolds. She walks the painted numbers around the playground and counts her favourite stickers over and over, layering the numbers in a little more each time.

To keep her interest while it was alive, I made her a cookie jar worksheet. A big glass jar with twenty cookie-shaped spots inside, each marked with a small number from 1 to 20. The cookies that go into them carry a growing number of choc chips — one chip for the first cookie, twenty for the last. Jin cut the cookies out herself, and together we stuck round velcro dots on the cookies and the jar. Once a cookie has more than ten chips, the counting gets a little tricky, but she works through it again and again, and the bigger numbers begin to feel familiar.

I remembered a counting book we had on the shelf and pulled it out, and it turned out to be more interesting than I'd remembered — a flip book that walks through 1 to 20, then 25, 50, 75, and 100. Each numbered flap is punched in the shape of the number, and underneath sit colourful objects or animals to count, plus a page of dots in the matching quantity. We filled the jar with cookies and emptied it back out, matching each cookie to a flap, reading the book, counting choc chips and the little objects on the pages — a whole evening filled with numbers.

She did a unicorn dot-to-dot from Pinterest on her own, and counted out loud with her sisters again and again — both of them still finding it sweet to watch their little sister learn the things they once did. Jin grows a little more every day. It really does happen in the blink of an eye.