Counting to 40

Our evenings are probably pretty boring to anyone else. We don't have cable or any TV hook-up though we do watch 1 hour of a DVD with dinner each night. We don't have an x-box or anything resembling one, although we are considering getting one. Of course we've been considering it for about 3 years now...

The nightly routine generally includes either 1 hour of anime or sci-fi, something that isn't too scary or disturbing for the munchkin to watch. Lately this has been Star Trek which she seems kind of bored by unless Q shows up and then she's riveted. So when boredom struck this evening we fell back on an old favorite: the count & jump game.

The game consists of A-chan jumping and the two of us counting her jumps. Tonight we got all the way up to 40 jumps at a time! I think we counted to 40 about 20 times, though, during the course of the hour that she wanted us to continue. It was very silly and lots of fun. We clap and yell yahoo whenever we get to 10, 20, 30 or 40. We speed up the higher the count and she tries to keep up, but ends up giggling too much and has to stop.

Has this game helped her counting skills? We honestly don't know. But she loves it! She gets so excited about it and kept asking us to count when we'd gotten all tuckered out and tried to stop. The amount of giggling from the count & jump is almost equal to being tickled!