Hands-on Counting Practice

By Genny Upton, on February 1st, 2012

We have been using a 1-100 abacus to practice counting lately.

We found ours at a thrift store for $6, but you can find them from lots of different places and in lots of different materials/styles. The pictured one is made by Melissa and Doug.

Roughly once a day I’ll model counting to 100 for the kids by moving one bead at a time. We’ve done that for awhile. I have them count with me as much as they can.

Now I also let the kids themselves practice moving one bead at a time while counting to 10 or 20 or even 100…helping with the tens number as needed.

Tonight we showed Luke how to move 10 beads at a time and count by 10s.

The abacus is such a great (non messy!) way to do hands-on counting practice!