That's exactly what I did with Q today. She had taken out the spindle boxes and was happily dropping spindles in to random boxes when I found her. I gently told her she hadn't had that presentation yet, but if she wanted to count we could work on the number rods together. The number rods are the child's first formal introduction to numbers in the classroom, usually we introduce them at around 4 years of age. Since Q is just barely 3.5 I figured I'd introduce her to the first 3 or so rods and that would be about as much counting as she could handle.
I was completely wrong.
After she had set up all the rods I sat at the mat with her and was pretty surprised when she readily identified the rods of 1 to 3 with no problem. 4 and 5 needed some counting, but I was blown away by her steady focus and concentration on the task at hand. So I made it a little harder. I sat on a stool a ways across the room and asked her to fetch a specific rod for me. Fetching this way is harder because not only does the child need to remember what they are looking for longer, but there are plenty of opportunities for distraction while they walk from one point of the room to another.
Q did much better than I had even hoped. I kept it pretty easy for her, but she brought me the correct rod most of the time...though once I did catch her asking an older child to help her find the correct rod! She really liked the one on one time though, and was so confident in her counting. I'm so glad that I followed her obvious interest in numbers, because from set up to complete clean up she was engaged in this counting activity for close to an hour.
Now that is impressive a 3 1/2 year old!
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