An activity for number counting to 100 by 10s – Krishna Fruit Juice Centre.
Our girls love role-plays. They love being hawkers, vendors and shopkeepers – they get to stock loads of stuff and handle loads of imaginary money. They enjoy being customers – they get to carry wallets and bags and choose what they want to buy.
So here’s one that we came up with to introduce number counting to 100 by 10s to them.
Materials Used:
- Cardboard box, big enough to hold 20 bottles, 10 popsicle stick labels, 20 straws and 2 wallets
- 20 bottles – we used Yakult bottles which are easy to hold and manage
- 10 images of fruits – we used images from old children’s books picked from Sunday street shops
- 10 popsicle sticks
- Straws – we cut them to be just enough for the Yakult bottles
- Coloured tape
- Wallets – we used passport photo holders
- Cardstock to write the numbers and make the currency (we re-used the flashcards on which the girls had scribbled)
- Stickers to label the juice bottles
- Hot glue gun and Markers
Activity Preparation:
1) Glue the fruit images on to the popsicle sticks. It helps to have the names of the fruits along with the images. Add the prices (10/- to 100/-) next to the images.
2) Stick the coloured tapes on the plastic bottles as per the colours of the juices that you are going to sell at the juice centre. We made 2 bottles each for every variety of fruit juice, a high probability that both B +ve and O +ve might select the same variant.
3) Label the bottles – write the names of the fruit juices.
4) Put the popsicle sticks and straws in each of the plastic bottles.
5) Cut the cardstock and make currency notes (10/- 20/- 30/- 40/- 50/- 60/- 70/- 80/- 90/- 100/-) and put them in the wallets.
6) Stick the tape on one side of the cardboard box. We wrote ‘Krishna Fruit Juice Centre’ on a flash card and glued it onto this side.
We are ready to go for counting to 100 by 10s.
Play (Counting to 100 by 10s):
Girls get super excited when they are told that we are going to set up a juice centre. Do they want to sell or do they want to buy? They want to be customers. So I end up being the fruit juice ‘shop uncle’. I take 5 minutes to bring out our fruit juice centre box, lay out the contents and set up shop on a table in our living room.
I pick up the 2 wallets, hand them over to my daughters and introduce them to the money in it. They begin rummaging and try getting a hang of the stuff that is in there.
It is O +ve’s turn first. She checks out the labelled bottles, the labelled popsicle sticks and is very happy to find her favourite lemon juice and right away orders for it. B +ve immediately says ‘me too’. They read out from the number-price label that it costs ten rupees. So, they dig into their wallets, fish out the money and hand it over to me.
The girls’ order for another juice, read out the numbers on the labels, take out the matching currency from their wallets and pay me. I hand over the bottles to them along with straws. There is, of course, nothing in the bottle but air, but they get so excited about having made a purchase that they start making all kinds of slurping sounds with their straws. Whilst at it, we speak about the particular fruit – colour, taste, seasonality, benefits, which part of the country it comes from and all other related trivia. The girls also try reading out the names of the fruits. This continues until they drink all the juices and their tummies are full.
Whenever they have their grandparents, uncles, aunts or friends visiting, the girls want to play this with them. We have done this activity a number of times and the girls still love slurping and making all kinds of sounds.
Way Forward:
As they get comfortable with counting to 100 by 10s, we now plan to change the number labels and the corresponding currency notes as well to familiarise them with other numbers. Inflation has got us as well, you see. Also, we might have to introduce new flavours onto our menu, just to keep our little customers happy and asking for more.
Fruit Juices are tasty, healthy and also help in counting to 100 by 10s.