Counting Balls With Monkey: How I taught my one-year-old to count

In my introductory post I talked about how I’m a stay-at-home dad and that my life pretty much centers around that, and I asked people if they were interested in hearing about the peaceful parenting and home schooling stuff. A few people expressed interest, so here goes.

When I was a toddler, I remember being able to count to 12 when I got to kindergarten. Why 12 you ask? Because that’s how high they counted in that Sesame Street song with the animated pinball graphic. It was a good teaching tool because it was entertaining and it grabbed my attention. I’ve always loved music, and so it was a natural way for me to absorb the concept of numbers.

My daughter isn’t that musical, however, so teaching her numbers was a little different than the way I learned. I think her favorite things in the world are animals. Her second favorite things in the world are stuffed animals. Somewhere in between are stuffed animals that talk (puppeted by me that is). This is what I used to teach her how to count.

I waited until about 16-17 months to do this because this is about how long it took for her to start really talking. I figured she needed to be able to communicate and understand what I’m saying in order for her to learn numbers. The time of when this will occur varies from child to child, but at this stage she was piecing together rudimentary sentences like “where dog?” I figured this would allow her to start saying the words necessary to count, and to say them in the correct order, so I began to formulate my strategy.

I took one of her stuffed animals, the monkey seen above, gave him a voice, and started a ritual every morning after her mother went to work and breakfast was over. “Counting Balls With Monkey” is what we came to call it. To give you an idea of what he sounds like, his voice I would say is a cross between Mickey Mouse and Mr. Hanky (for you South Park fans out there). We’ve got a small ball pit in the living room, the kind you see at indoor playgrounds, except on a much smaller scale. Monkey would grab the balls out of the ball pit, toss them on the ground and count them out as they went. I would hold him by the scruff of the neck and make him move around as I was voicing the words. This allowed me to pick things up and make it look like the monkey was doing it.

Then we just drilled the numbers one through ten over and over until she got sick of listening to Monkey talk. What’s funny is that after the first couple of times, it was me that got sick of it before she did. My vocal chords would be screaming at me to stop and I felt like my brain was going to explode from the repetition, and she just kept saying “more!” Going into your head voice for so long like that can be brutal on the vocal cords too. It worked so well, she became obsessed with counting balls with monkey, and we were doing it all throughout the day, at least five or six sessions, often more.

After a while I began to switch gears a little because I found it difficult to get her to repeat what I was saying. She was engaged in the subject matter because she was engaged in the Monkey character and the physical activity of throwing the balls as they were counted off, but she refused to repeat the numbers with me. I was convinced that she understood what I was saying and remembered some of it, because she was repeating other things that we said around the house, but I just couldn’t get her to say the numbers back on cue.

So I invented another character. Someone bought me a Buffalo pillow pet a few years ago and so I decided to employ Mr. Buffalo as one of the characters in the education department at our home. Buffalo has a deep voice, so I don’t have to strain so hard (thank goodness). I’d say he’s like a more gravelly sounding Sam Elliott, the polar opposite of Monkey.

Here’s the thing about Buffalo though; he can’t count. He’s a bit of a dunce and slow on the uptake, so he struggles once he gets past the number two. “Hmm, I used to know what came after two… can you help me? I don’t remember.” Every time he tries to count, Buffalo gets hung up, and so Monkey, being a counting monkey and all, has to help him along in the counting.

After a couple of times with Monkey helping Buffalo along, Monkey got hidden away and just Buffalo was there trying to count with my daughter. Since I was doing the voice of Buffalo, she was the only one there who could help Buffalo to count, and after two or three times, she began to count with him as he asked for her help. I don’t remember the exact progression, but she got to two, then three, and just gradually progressed from there. I would then re-introduce Monkey to tell her the next number, and so on. During this period we began to count other things as well, because I would tire of counting with Buffalo and Monkey, but my daughter was already a master negotiator by then, so she would talk me into counting other things like her shoes and other toys.

I remember one moment in particular during this time that Grandma and Grandpa were over visiting and we were all amazed when she spontaneously counted to four while pointing at her shoes! This was somewhere in the eighteen months time frame and she just ran away with it from there. After she got to ten, I started working on the teens, but decided to lay off a little because I sensed that she was struggling a bit with it. After fifteen for some reason she would lose her place. I was suspicious that she wasn’t getting that numbers are a pattern that repeats every ten numbers, so she was just memorizing them, and I don’t think she could cram any more in her head after that magic number fifteen.

Once we got to this point, I decided to start doing visual identification of the numbers, since she had the basic counting to ten down and beyond, and so I wanted to impart the visual symbols associated with numbers. I got out Monkey again for this and we bought ourselves a little one and a half foot square blackboard that we could take into the living room near the ball pit where she was used to doing the counting. I would draw the numbers one through ten and Monkey would point to them and count through.

This was a little harder to get her interested in because she was so used to Monkey doing things, and his novelty had worn off. But she still asked repeatedly to “Count the balls with Monkey” so I would take that opportunity every time to get out the chalk board and go over them visually. Eventually she was able to identify every one, and when we got to ten, we hit a wall. The numbers eleven to fifteen and beyond gave her problems though, confirming my suspicion that she didn’t understand the repeating pattern of numbers and that she had just memorized them. She would identify the individual digits in the number twelve for example, one and two, but she didn’t get that they were to be grouped together. I thought that was enough for a 1-year-old so I left that as good enough for now, as I didn’t want to induce anxiety about counting and numbers. She now could reliably count to fifteen and identify all of the single digit numbers, along with ten.

Now we just occasionally go over what she already knows to maintain it in her memory, but I took a long break from going further. She’s now over the age of two and I’m throwing around the idea of picking it back up again, but have to develop a new technique to keep her interest. The old Monkey and Buffalo characters aren’t quite as interesting anymore, so a new approach will be needed. I’ll be sure to share what I come up with here in the future.

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