How To Teach Kids Numbers 1 to 10

For some reason students love counting. That is lucky because numbers are a basic part of almost any young learners’ course, starting with counting up to five or ten and moving on to money, dates, times and the rest. This article is about the early stages of that process, including making this endlessly repeated topic always new and interesting. Most of the activities and advice below also work with higher numbers, e.g. up to twenty or up to a hundred in tens.

The seven stages of teaching these numbers are:

1. Counting up to 10
2. Counting down from 10 to 1
3. Counting things
4. Understanding and responding to spoken random numbers between 1 and 10
5. Being able to say random numbers when shown the figure
6. Recognising and responding to numbers written out as words, e.g. number word recognition, word shape recognition and recognition of certain key letters. (First letter recognition isn’t enough as there are two numbers starting with T and two starting with F.)
7. Being able to write the numbers

The teaching ideas below more or less follow the order above.