St. Patrick's Day Counting Book

Leprechauns love to have gold coins in their pots of gold, and preschoolers love to count, so, why not make a St. Patrick's Day Counting Book?

Targets
Vocabulary- leprechaun, pot of gold, gold coins
Counting to 5 with 1:1 correspondence
Number recognition

First, we gathered our materials- enough books for each student, lots of gold coins, glue, a  pot and a leprechaun.
We talked about each item, giving the students repeated practice with naming the vocabulary. They could hear the words over and over again and have a chance to say them.

Throughout the activity, the students needed to request items before they got them ("I want a book;" "I want a leprechaun"). The first thing we did was to decorate the cover with the leprechaun, pot and some gold coins. They could follow our pattern or put them anywhere they wanted.

Next, we went through the book, page by page to add the gold coins.

On each page, there was a number written (we use the Touch Math concept; that's why there are dots on the numbers) to work on number recognition and a circle drawn on to represent how many gold coins went on the page. This helped them with counting with 1:1 correspondence. Finally, there were written words to help encourage pre-reading skills.

As the students requested their gold coins, they had more and more practice with counting.
This activity is a nice example of how pre-academic concepts, such as math, can be incorporated into speech and language therapy! The students practiced counting as they practiced requesting and vocabulary!
.